


Macaroni and Power Armor

by saltslimes



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Babysitter AU, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Incredibly slow build, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-07 06:42:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 25,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3165152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltslimes/pseuds/saltslimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was just supposed to be a fucking job. But then, like everything else in Tucker’s miserable life, it snowballed. It snowballed into a fucking avalanche until he was knocking on Wash’s door at four in the morning desperate and exhausted and ready to beg for help. Because he was not cut out for this shit. He was a lover, not a father.</p>
<p>AU in which Tucker is the worst (best?) babysitter that the Mother of Invention has ever seen. And things go about as terribly as you might expect them to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It was just supposed to be a fucking job. But then, like everything else in Tucker’s miserable life, it snowballed. It snowballed into a fucking avalanche until he was knocking on Wash’s door at four in the morning desperate and exhausted and ready to beg for help. Because he was not cut out for this shit. He was a lover, not a father.

 

Some time earlier

 

The thing about choosing military enlistment as your career was that you never had to go job hunting. Or at least, that was supposed to be the thing about it. Tucker signed up, he went through basic, hung around doing nothing at a few random outposts while Master Chief won the war, and then he got told: don’t call us, we’ll call you. It probably had something to do with a certain comment to a certain female superior officer when he was getting reassigned.

They stationed him on guard duty in what was essentially the most random and least likely to get attacked corridor on the entire fuckin’ ship, and then left him to rot. There wasn’t even anyone to talk to. He lasted a month, and then he started going insane.

Unfortunately, he had no skills for the actual job market, and no money to get back on planet anyways. So he started looking around for other on ship jobs that required basically no training but involved at some point talking to an actual human. Preferably a female human. And preferably doing more than talking. Obviously, no jobs like that existed.

But after he sent out some emails, and then some more desperate, less lewd emails, he eventually got a response. It wasn’t even from a human. It was from an auto-responder. But interestingly, it was from the director’s auto-responder, Phyllis. Tucker checked it twice, and went all the up to the main deck to find and ask someone. They confirmed that yeah, the director meant the Director. Like, the guy in charge. Like the guy running the ship.

Tucker read the email a lot more closely than he was originally planning to. It read like a deal with the devil. Literally, this guy’s template correspondences sounded conniving. But the gist of it was this: bizarrely, he was looking for a babysitter. The job offer listed the director’s daughter, two “unidentified children” whatever that was supposed to mean, and “another child.” Just “another” child. No mention of whose it might be, or the gender or age of said child. In fact, it didn’t list the ages of any of them.

Tucker would have thought it was a prank, but from what he’d seen up until then, he was on a strict, no-nonsense, military tight ship. Since the war ended most people had regained a little humour. Not the Director, apparently. And he seemed to have infected his entire crew with that humourlessness. Soon, Tucker imagined he was going to cease understanding jokes.

Did he want to take the job? Obviously not. He wasn’t a babysitter. And why they wanted a guy who had been relegated to door watching duty for sexual harassment looking after children, he wasn’t sure of either. But the thing was, he needed money, because money was his only ticket off the ship so he could get a better, or at least different job. Clearly, he wasn’t suited to the army. Or the army wasn’t suited to him. Either way, he wanted out, and the babysitting job paid more than hallway watching. And it would mean he’d get to talk to someone at least. Even if it was just boring kids.

So he accepted it. And boy, he didn’t know it, but that was where it all started going downhill.

He showed up to the first day armour-free, which made him feel all loose and light and weird. It was hard to guess what kind of clothing was babysitting appropriate so he went with a t-shirt and jeans and hoped he wouldn’t be somehow underdressed. Business attire wasn’t appropriate to babysit, was it? Even if it was, he didn’t own a suit. So he showed up with his hands stuffed in his pockets and doubled checked the door number. Then he knocked. He was greeted at the door by a man who introduced himself as just: Counselor. Like, as if he didn’t have a real name. Tucker decided it was better not to ask.

“You will be staying in the quarters with the children. Allow me to extend the Director’s gratitude. While he could not be here to thank you in person, he greatly appreciates you volunteering as a replacement.”

“Uh, yeah, whatever dude. Hold on, replacement?”

“The previous caretaker quit on somewhat short notice.” There was a beat of silence, where Tucker tried to figure out the appropriate response to this news. _“Lucky for me?”_ No, that would sound so stupid. “Well, I’ll leave you to familiarize yourself with the new space,” the Counselor said, giving him a nod and heading for the door.

“Wait, what about the kids?”

“They’re just in the next room.”

“You aren’t going to introduce me?”

“The children are perfectly capable of introducing themselves to you.” And with that he left. Tucker watched the door slide shut behind him.

“That guy is weird,” he muttered. Then he heard a door open, and looked around. A pair of wide brown eyes were peering at him from around the corner. “Oh, uh hey there,” he tried. The kid blinked. Then he was pushed out into the open by a red headed girl with bright green eyes and a glare that could probably melt through solid steel. Tucker almost took a step back, but he reminded himself not to be afraid of a… what? Ten year old?

“You’re the new babysitter?”

“I do not like him,” the shorter one said, shaking his head.

“Yeah well, I don’t like you either, but I like money.”

“What’s your name?” the girl asked.

“Tucker.”

“That’s not a real name.”  
“Okay first of all, yes it is, and second, it’s my last name.” Great job Tucker. Already arguing with the ten year old. Real mature.

“So what’s your first name then?”

“Lavernius.”

“I can not pronounce that,” the short one said.

“Just call me Tucker, okay? What are your names?”

“I’m Carolina. This is Caboose.”

“Okay, his name is Caboose, and you’re making fun of my name? Wait but they said three kids, where’s the other one?” Carolina jerked a thumb over her shoulder into the room, and Tucker stepped up to the doorway to see a kid on the bed immersed in playing a game on a handheld device.

“That’s Gamma.”

“Don’t talk to me you dirty shisno.”

“Um. What’s his deal?”

“He was kidnapped by aliens or something and now he’s really weird.” Gamma didn’t dignify this with a response.

“Awesome. I probably should have expected this.” From somewhere within the small living quarters, came the sound of a baby crying. “Is that a baby?”

“You’re the expert,” Carolina said.

“Don’t be smart.”

“Stellar advice for kids.”

“I never make that mistake,” Caboose said.

“What?” Tucker asked.

“Being smart. It is not a problem that I have.”

“What? Is he okay, does he have a concussion?” Carolina just shrugged. The sound of the baby didn’t stop.

“There’s definitely a baby here,” Tucker said, stepping back into the other room. It was not hard to find. It was in a bassinet by the couch. He just wasn’t very observant apparently.

“What do I do?” he asked.

“You’re the expert,” Carolina said, again.

“Pick him up,” Caboose advised. Tucker picked him up. It did not help.

“Hold on, him? Do you know this baby?” Carolina shrugged again.

“Maybe.”

“You know this baby. Who is this? Gamma?” He called. “What is this baby’s name?”

“Theta,” Gamma replied, in the same bored monotone. Tucker was pretty sure he also heard him call him a name from the next room.

“Theta? Seriously Theta? You’re not the only one with a weird name? Is he lying to me?” Tucker asked.

“No, that’s Theta,” Carolina said, dropping down on the couch. Caboose took this as a cue to sit down on Tucker’s other side. Theta did not take any cues. He continued screaming his tiny face off.

“Why is this baby called Theta? That’s so stupid.”

“You’re stupid,” Carolina said, and then added, “Will you make us macaroni?”

“I hate macaroni,” Gamma called from the next room, in a voice utterly void of emotion. Theta took this opportunity to stop crying, and spit up on Tucker’s shirt.

“Fuck,” Tucker said. Caboose’s mouth dropped open. Carolina grinned. “I mean _frick_.” 

 

He did make them macaroni, and while he did he desperately grilled Carolina for information such as: where is the baby formula? How do you even make baby formula? Yes the directions are on the package of course I know that I’m not an idiot, and finally, what does Gamma eat if he doesn’t eat macaroni? Like the smart little swindler she clearly was, she didn’t speak up until she’d seen him open the package.

“He says the aliens fed him bugs.”

“Ooo-kay. I’m gonna not feed him that. What have you seen him eat?” Carolina shrugged. “Gamma, do you eat bread?” Tucker called.

“No,” Gamma called back.

“Will you at least come in here?”

“No,” Gamma called.

“I ate a sock once,” Caboose said. “I thought it would make me run faster.” Tucker stared.

“Is he for real?”

“He’s the realest,” Carolina said. Tucker ladled macaroni into two bowls for Caboose and Carolina, watched Caboose ignore his warning about how hot it was an immediately burn his tongue, got Caboose a glass of milk and then went back to the fridge to look for something he could convince Gamma to eat.

“Lunch meat? Will he eat lunch meat? Mayo?”

“He eats meat sometimes,” Carolina said, now willing to spill her secrets since she’d already gotten her hands on the goods.

“Gamma come in here and eat something,” Tucker called. When he got no response he picked Theta up out of the baby carrier, desperately asked Carolina to watch Caboose (or at least yell if he choked or something) and went back into the bedroom. He hadn’t really gotten a look at it before. A crib, two bunk beds… not much else. Pretty barren place to keep kids. But then again, keeping kids on a military ship was weird to begin with, so. Gamma was still sitting on one of the bottom bunks, still playing his video game.

“You have to eat,” Tucker told him. He stuck his tongue out.

“Knock knock.”

“Gamma,” Tucker gritted out. Gamma said nothing.

“Fine. Who’s there?”

“You are.”

“You are who?”

“You are a dirty dirty shisno.”

“Look, I don’t know what that means—”

“The aliens taught me it.”

“Yeah, okay, it sounds like it’s definitely not kid appropriate language,” Tucker said, scowling. Kid was really dumb if he didn’t think Tucker knew a swearword when he heard one. Gamma sagged a little. He was probably hungry. “Look kid, I’ll make a deal with you. Either you come pick something to eat now, or I make you eat whatever I decide later.”

“I’m not going to eat anything,” Gamma snapped.

“You’ll get hungry,” Tucker said. Either Gamma recognized that it wasn’t an empty threat or the thing about aliens and eating bugs was actually true, because after a few seconds of glaring he dropped the game and slid off the bed like a prisoner on his way to the chopping block, following Tucker into the kitchen. Tucker had to hold back a grin when he watched Caboose and Carolina cleaning the last macaroni off their plates, and Gamma reluctantly eating the lunch meat and some crackers Tucker found in the cupboard that were reasonably non-stale. This isn’t that hard, he thought to himself. And he put the whole “the last babysitter quitting story sounds very suspicious” thing out of his head. He really, really shouldn’t have though. 

 

Part of the gig was that it was twenty four seven, which didn’t sound that bad when Tucker was considering it, because hey, kids had to sleep too, right? Wrong, apparently. After some serious wrangling, wheedling, and one inexplicable full meltdown from Caboose, he finally got them to bed, and collapsed on the fold out couch that was going to serve as his bedroom accommodations for the next however the fuck long he was living on the Mother of Invention.

When he was just some schmuck guarding a door, he used to spend hours in his bunk trying to think of something to do. Well besides… the obvious. But that could get kind of tiring. A man only has so much stamina.

Now though, he was practically asleep the minute his face hit the pillow. And he could have slept until morning, but some time in the bowels of the night he was woken by Theta, who was in the crib in the kids room and according to Carolina “usually slept through the night.”

Tucker found himself feeling like him waking up was both an insult to his person and somehow his fault. Like he’d put him to bed wrong and messed everything up. Gamma slept through it totally undisturbed, but Caboose was up, rubbing his eyes blearily, and Carolina watched him with owlish eyes as he entered the room, walked into one of the bunk beds, and retrieved Theta from where he was sitting in the crib, clutching the bars and coughing out tearful sobs.

He picked him up but then he didn’t know what to do. How did he get him back to sleep? How did he get Caboose and Carolina back to sleep? He bounced him up and down and looked over at the other kids. They were watching him, like they were sizing him up. Waiting for him to make a mistake. Well, this fuckin’ sucks, Tucker thought. He bounced Theta some more.

“You going to change him or just stand there?” Carolina asked. Right. That made sense, Tucker thought.

“Uh, yeah. I’m doing that,” he said. He’d already changed him twice since showing up. It wasn’t that hard. Carolina was better at it than him though, for an eleven year old (he’d asked) and she was weirdly smug about it. He left the room for the bright light of the bathroom and unfolded the stupid little baby change table, pulling out a new diaper and softly and somewhat desperately shushing Theta as he exchanged his horrible old diaper for a clean new one.

“Shhh, come on, why can’t you just be chill?” he asked quietly.”

“Great job,” Carolina said from the doorway. Damn, she could really sneak when she wanted to.

“Go back to bed,” Tucker told her.

“I came to pee. And you missed one of the diaper tabs,” Carolina said, stepping past him. Tucker looked down at Theta, chewing on his fingers and goggling up at Tucker. He had missed one of the little sticky tabs. He carried Theta back into the room and set him in the crib. Then he just stood there for a minute. Theta lay still, blinking up at him. Then his eyes kind of glazed over. Tucker backed away slowly. The toilet flushed in the bathroom and Carolina crept back in, climbing into her bed.

“Okay, um. Go back to sleep,” Tucker said, and retreated for the main room. When he dropped onto the couch bed he lay for a few minutes with his face in the pillow, breathing in that weird musty recycled ship air and cheap laundry detergent smell. Then he rolled over and fell asleep. 

 

Breakfast wasn’t that hard. Tucker folded up the couch bed in-between drinking as much coffee as possible and coming back to the high chair that Theta was in to convince him that he wanted to eat cheerios. It was the weird kind of high chair that clipped onto a counter and he was pretty sure he’d gotten it attached properly but he didn’t feel safe until Carolina slunk out of the bedroom, eyed it, and sat down without saying anything. She and Caboose got cheerios as well. If there were lucky charms anywhere on the mother of invention, it wasn’t here. Fortunately, the kids ate cheerios like they’d never heard of sugar cereals. And maybe they hadn’t. Gamma refused cereal but Tucker talked him into eating some yoghurt, which he apparently liked.

Caboose then dragged out pencils and paper from under his bed and set himself up drawing on the floor in the middle of the room. Tucker put Theta down on the blanket and let him roll around chewing on his hands. It was weird that he had no toys. All kids needed toys, didn’t they? He wasn’t an expert, but he felt like they should at least have some blocks or something.

“Shouldn’t you guys be in school?” Tucker asked Carolina, but when he looked over she was no longer sitting beside him at the counter. In a few seconds, she emerged from the bedroom carrying a worn workbook, and brought it to the counter. She sat down beside Tucker and flipped it open. It was a math practice book. For ninth graders.

“Isn’t that kind of advanced?” Tucker asked. Carolina shrugged.

“The director wants me to do these.” It struck Tucker then, that the email had said the director’s daughter. He somehow hadn’t put two and two together. So this was his kid, and he had her on a military ship in the middle of nowhere, taken care of by a glorified door guard, living what was basically a barren apartment with no windows. He didn’t sound like a stellar dad. And his daughter called him the director, which wasn’t great.

“Hey, so, I get why you’re here I guess, but what’s the deal with the rest?” he asked. Carolina gave him a look.

“I’m trying to work,” she said.

“If you tell me I’ll leave you alone and play with the floor crew.” Apparently that was incentive enough. Carolina set down her pen.

“We don’t make unnecessary stops. Caboose was rescued from a colony where an op went bad, Gamma got picked up after a fight with hostile aliens.”

“Don’t his parents want him back?” Tucker asked.

“He doesn’t have parents,” Carolina said, casually—no, clinically. Well shit, Tucker thought. I shouldn’t have asked. As promised, he slid off the stool and onto the floor to draw with Caboose. He was drawing a picture of a tank. Wow, charmed life these kids were living. Later, when Carolina had finished her math problems, Caboose had almost eaten two pencils and maybe actually managed to eat half an eraser, the Counselor came to check up on them.

Tucker didn’t know their door had a little doorbell sound imitator until he was at the sink trying to wipe baby vomit off his shirt, and Carolina went:

“Are you going to get that?”

“Get what?”

“The door.”

“That’s the door? I thought that was Caboose.”

“I will get it!” Caboose piped up, and Tucker heard his feet thudding across the floor.

“Wait, no, Caboose—” Tucker started, but when he turned around he knocked the milk jug over and had to grab it and right it before it drained onto the floor and Caboose was already up on his tiptoes pressing the door unlock button.

“You thought that was Caboose?” Carolina asked.

“You know. He makes noises,” Tucker said uselessly, casting his eyes around for a rag.

“It’s hanging on the tap,” a smooth voice said from the doorway, and Tucker looked up to meet the condescending face of the Counselor.

“Oh. Thanks,” Tucker said, grabbing the cloth and wiping the milk before it could spread any further. The Counselor walked into the bedroom and stuck his head in, then came back into the kitchen and flipped through Carolina’s workbook. The kids seemed kind of mesmerized by him, because they shut up. In fact, from the sound of it, Gamma had turned off his video game.

“The director sent me to make sure everything was going well,” the Counselor said. Tucker wrung out the cloth in the sink and wiped his hands on his jeans.

“Well, nobody’s died,” he said, and laughed nervously. Probably that was a stupid thing to say.

“The director will no doubt be pleased to hear that,” he said. Yeah, definitely a stupid thing to say. “Why don’t you children go to your room so I can talk with Private Tucker?” the Counselor said. Shockingly, Carolina slid off the stool she was sitting at and filed into the bedroom. Caboose followed her like a puppy. Carolina shut the door behind them.

“The director really is very grateful for your assistance,” the Counselor said. Tucker frowned.

“Carolina’s his daughter right?”

“That is  correct.”

“When was the last time he actually saw her?” Tucker asked. He knew he shouldn’t have said it the second the words were out of his mouth, but it was too late. The Counselor’s face took on this pinched expression, like he had a headache and was being called upon to explain very simple concepts to some very stupid person.

“The director is a very busy man,” he said carefully.

“Of course. I get it,” Tucker said. He didn’t get it, but whatever. It wasn’t his problem if this guy didn’t want to see his own kid.

“Well, it seems you’re doing fine here.”

“Um, yeah, you know,” Tucker fumbled for something else to say, but the Counselor was already heading for the door. He was a busy man too, of course. Whatever that meant.

“I’ll return later in the week,” the Counselor said. Then he left. Tucker dropped onto the couch beside Theta, who was sucking on a pacifier, not at all concerned by the weird conversation he’d just witnessed.

“That guy’s kinda like… an asshole, you know?” he said. Theta drooled the pacifier out of his mouth. Tucker pushed it back in with his thumb and wiped baby drool on the hem of his shirt. The bedroom door slid open.

“Is he gone now?” Caboose asked.

“Yeah, he’s gone,” Tucker said. Caboose came back into the room and picked up his drawing stuff, going back to coloring his weird picture of a guy in Spartan armour shooting a dragon. Tucker heard Gamma’s game turn back on. “What do you want to eat?” Tucker asked.

“Food,” Caboose said, with not the slightest hint of joking in his tone. Tucker rolled his eyes.

“Okay, great.” He just went with peanut butter sandwiches and carrots. If there was one thing he knew about kids (and he didn’t know a lot about kids) it was that they liked simple stuff. Caboose climbed up to the counter when he saw food on it, and Gamma sidled out of the room when Tucker called. He was almost feeling pretty accomplished when he realized Carolina wasn’t around. He stuck his head in the bedroom and found her sitting on her bunk, tearing up pieces of paper and tossing them towards Caboose’s bed. The floor was littered with paper snow. Great, who has to clean that, Tucker thought.

“You coming to get food?” Tucker asked. Carolina didn’t respond. “You okay? Are you sick or something?” Tucker asked. Oh god, please don’t be sick he thought. I don’t want to get thrown up on, not today. He wouldn’t even know what to do, and she’d get the other kids sick and—

“No,” Carolina said, cutting off that rapidly spiralling train of thought. Tucker sagged with relief.

“You… upset about something?” he hazarded. Carolina stopped tearing the paper and fixed him with a glare.

“No,” she said.

“You wanna talk about it?” Tucker asked, kind of secretly hoping her answer would be the same as the last two.

“No,” Carolina said, and slid off the bed, walking past Tucker into the main room. He watched her climb up to sit beside Gamma, and punch him in the shoulder when he started telling a knock-knock joke. He looked back at the paper snow. Then he walked over to her bed, and picked up the book she’d been tearing paper out of. It was her workbook. In the next room, Theta started crying, and Tucker groaned out loud, and left the bedroom to deal with it.


	2. Chapter 2

After about three days, the kids had officially reached peak obnoxiousness. Tucker was about a hundred percent sure that human (and whatever Caboose was supposed to be) children could not get more annoying. He was sitting on the couch desperately trying to calm Theta down, and Gamma and Caboose were bouncing on the couch, which was not helping in any way, and Carolina, who had been angry and destructive ever since probably overhearing Tucker and the Counselor’s conversation, was bending the forks and spoons, using a chair as leverage.

“Okay! Everyone shut the fuck up and stop what you’re doing,” Tucker yelled. Shockingly, they actually shut the fuck up and stopped what they were doing. “We’re going out,” he said.

“Into space?” Caboose asked. Gamma looked both nervous and excited at this proposal.

“No, just outside. Into the ship. Out of this room. Everyone put shoes on,” Tucker said, plopping the still crying Theta into the baby carrier, despite knowing full well he could climb out of it, and finding his own shoes. Surprisingly, the kids complied pretty easily, seeking out and presenting him with shoes to lace up, on in Caboose’s case, re-Velcro. Tucker wanted to point out that a kid his age should be able to operate Velcro tabs, but it was Caboose, so he just didn’t. Even Carolina put on her shoes. Tucker decided to just carry Theta and accept how punishing it would be to his arms. He could crawl, but he couldn’t walk and did not seem interested in learning how.

Tucker grabbed the key-card and slipped it in his pocket, and then they headed out into the ship. The kids immediately scattered, all different in checking out different parts of the incredibly boring hallway. Tucker introduced a buddy system.

“Caboose, you and Carolina are buddies,” he said. Caboose slipped his no-doubt sticky hand into Carolina’s. She gave Tucker a betrayed look over her shoulder. “What about me?” Gamma asked.

“You’re Theta’s buddy.”

“I don’t have to hold his hand though, right?” Gamma asked.

“No.”

“Okay. I don’t want to hold hands with a shisno.”

“You seriously got to stop using that word, kid,” Tucker said. “Okay, everyone got their buddy? Fan-fu-fricking tastic. Let’s go.” So they set out at an incredibly slow pace. The ship was pretty boring, if not more boring than the room, but the kids were pretty psyched about it. Caboose pointed out switch panels he thought were interesting (spoiler: all of them). Gamma conned the guards they ran into (who were not yet wise to his games) into doing knock knock jokes with him, and Carolina… Well Carolina didn’t seem to hate it. She at least didn’t actively complain about it.

Theta squirmed like crazy to be let down at one point, and Tucker let him crawl for a little while, but then he sort of just lay down like he was gonna take a floor nap and Tucker scooped him up because he kept imaging him getting stepped on.

“Do you have kids in real life?” Carolina asked, out of nowhere. Tucker froze.

“This is real life,” he said.

“You know what I mean,” she said. Tucker swallowed thickly.

“I did. Sort of. Once,” he said. He remembered before the Mother of Invention, a worse deployment, in a shitty outpost, back during the real war, before the covenant was a nightmare of the past. His whole garrison got hit, and the aliens… when the medical people picked him up, he’d already had the thing, and he thought it would die it was so small and ugly and struggling to breathe. But it didn’t, it lived. And being parasitized is not the same as being a parent, but he swore, it looked in his eyes and it was like… it was like almost…

“Do you want to talk about it?” Carolina said, her tone almost joking. She’s eleven, Tucker thought. _How would I even begin to explain? Why would I even want to explain?_ He shook his head. The medical people took it away from him. They thought it had messed with his head, because he tried to fight them. Either way, it didn’t matter now. Privately, he suspected he’d gotten the job offer partly because of it. He hoped it wasn’t the case. Because if it was, that was really sick.

“No,” he said.

“I am tired,” Caboose announced.

“That’s why we’re walking back, Tucker said.

“I do not want to walk back,” Caboose said, and sat down on the floor like the discussion was over.

“If Caboose isn’t walking I’m not walking either,” Gamma said. Carolina looked up at Tucker with an expression that seemed to say “how are you gonna get out of this one, genius?” He groaned.

“You both have to walk,” Tucker said.

“Theta isn’t walking,” Caboose pointed out.

“Theta can’t walk!”

“He does seem kind of lazy,” Carolina said.

“You’re not helping,” Tucker snapped. “Just… just walk to the window up there, okay? Then we’ll take a rest.” His arms were killing him anyway. The kids, whining and grumbling the whole time, walked there. When they got to the window, they shut up. Before them was space, an ocean of stars on a black backdrop. Tucker had been awed by it the first time he traveled, and then again, when he joined the guard crew for the Mother of Invention. But viewing it through a porthole every day in the bathroom when he brushed his teeth, it got kind of old. Here, through the huge window, it was something else altogether.

Caboose pressed his face to the glass. Gamma reached out and touched a hand to the window like he was testing it was there. Carolina dropped down so she was sitting cross legged. Tucker followed her lead and sat down awkwardly, positioning Theta in his lap. He immediately squirmed out and crawled over to the window to look out at the stars. No one said anything for a blessed few minutes. It felt like an eternity. Then Gamma said he was hungry, and everyone decided to agree with him.

They were out of both windows and wonderment for the rest of the way home, so Tucker couldn’t pull the same stunt to shut them up a second time. Instead he did the “leaving you behind in a hallway” gambit. It wouldn’t have worked, but Carolina (probably taking pity on him) played along, and soon an offended Gamma and tearful Caboose were both chasing after them.

“Mr. Tucker, you wouldn’t really leave us behind, right?” Caboose sobbed, clinging to Tucker’s pant leg. Okay, it worked a little too well. Gamma was sullen, glaring at the floor. He knew he’d been played, but he probably wanted to be left alone as much as Caboose.

“Uh, no. And you should just call me Tucker,” Tucker said.

“He’s getting paid to take care of us, idiot,” Carolina said. Caboose seemed only half convinced, and he clung onto Tucker until they were actually back in the room. Feeling sort of guilty, Tucker asked them what they wanted for dinner.

Gamma suggested raw meat, and was outvoted by Carolina and Caboose. So they had macaroni. They didn’t even have any meat. Tucker convinced him to eat like two spoonfuls of macaroni, and then gave up and ate his portion. He told Gamma to pick something he wanted from the fridge and hoped for the best. He ended up taking a banana, which he did actually eat, but then he spent like ten minutes slapping Carolina and Caboose with the peel until the whining reached a volume capable of motivating Tucker to take it away from him.

“Please, can’t everyone just shut up?” Tucker begged them. They paid zero attention to him. Gamma and Carolina had started a game where they tried to see who could flick a booger the furthest, the ultimate target being Caboose, who was doodling on the floor. Tucker sat on the couch with Theta on his lap, too tired to put more effort into stopping them. Theta was fussing, making these little crying hiccupy noises, and Tucker was rubbing his back.

“Come on. Just… stop. Be silent. Chill out,” Tucker said, kind of more to himself than to Theta. But then Theta burped and puked formula and mashed bananas onto the front of Tucker’s shirt. It was a sign of how low he had sunk that he wasn’t even upset, he was just relieved because Theta quit crying. He blinked up at Tucker, and there was this terrifying moment of recognition, where he could tell Theta was actually seeing him, like not just a face or a pair of hands to provide milk and safety, but like… him. Tucker. The person. It jolted him. And then he noticed something.

“Guys,” Tucker said, and didn’t even get so much as a look. “Guys, did Theta always have different colored eyes?” he asked, sitting up to look at them better, holding Theta out in front of him to see that no, it wasn’t a trick of the light, he had these big, mismatched eyes, one blue and one kind of pink. He spent all his time sleeping or crying, so Tucker hadn’t noticed they were so weird.

“Uh, yeah,” Carolina said.

“You seriously have no idea where he came from?” Tucker asked, and got shrugs in reply. Gamma flicked a booger so far it actually hit Caboose’s paper, and his face lit up as he high-fived Carolina.

“Cut that out. Or at least let Caboose play,” Tucker said, getting up off the couch to put Theta down for a nap.

“Caboose is playing the quiet game,” Gamma said.

“And I just won again. You guys are really bad at this,” Caboose said. Tucker rolled his eyes. At least he was happy. 

 

Two days later, the Counselor visited again. This time, Tucker answered the door with Theta clutching his shirt and screaming his tiny lungs out, and Gamma and Caboose each holding onto one of his legs and screaming at the top of their lungs that the other one was being annoying. Whatever that meant. They were always annoying, it was nothing to scream over. At hearing the door, Carolina had retreated into their room and pointedly shut the door.

“Hello Private Tucker,” the Counselor said. “I hope this is not a bad time?”

“Uh, no it’s fine,” Tucker said. Thankfully, Gamma and Caboose shut up, and retreated into their room with Carolina. They seemed kind of scared of the Counselor, which Tucker totally understood. He was kind of scared of him to. Maybe scared wasn’t the right word. Wary? Creeped out? Something like that. Theta wasn’t really old enough to be shy, but he seemed shocked by the sudden lack of screaming, and quieted down to the clingy sobs he did when nothing was wrong but he wanted attention.

“I came to check that there have been no… difficulties.” The Counselor had this way of saying everything like it was a euphemism for something else, and it honestly pissed Tucker off. But he just bounced Theta in his arms by the counter and nodded.

“Yeah, things are fine. Gamma complains about the food a lot.”

“Gamma is something of a… special case.”

“Did he really get taken by the aliens?” Tucker asked.

“Did Gamma tell you this?” the Counselor asked, and Tucker saw his glance slide over to the closed door.

“No, Carolina,” Tucker said. The Counselor nodded thoughtfully, like he was taking note of this.

“It’s true that Gamma was… briefly misplaced in his early childhood. He spent a year with the aliens before we were able to retrieve him. It seemed the experience has left him a little… peculiar,” the Counselor said. Tucker felt his skin crawl, and he held Theta a little closer to his body. He could feel that little heartbeat against his chest, and Theta was very much warm and alive, squirming and reaching for the colorful cups that Caboose and Gamma had left out on the counter.

Where he grew up, in the colonies, aliens were like… an urban legend almost. They existed on the news, as part of a faraway war, something that happened to other people. Like something not necessarily real. But he knew now, firsthand, just how real they were. He thought of looking into small golden eyes and being terrified and kind of… elated at the same time. Yet again, Tucker suspected that they had known when they asked him to take the job, and he resented it.

“Yeah, Gamma sure is one of a kind,” he said. The Counselor’s face remained impassive.

“One could say that,” he said, slowly. “I actually had a second reason for coming here,” the Counselor said. “I was sent to ask you how you would feel about taking on another charge.”

“Like another kid?” They did have one more bunk bed. But it was already pretty fuckin’ busy with just the four. _Just the four_. What was he thinking? Four was already way too many. Especially Theta, the world’s neediest baby. “I’ll bring him around in the morning and everyone can get acquainted. He has been working with one of our ships operatives, but we think he might be more suited by a more… nurturing environment.”

“One of your ship’s operatives? But this is a military ship,” Tucker said.

“You must understand, Delta is a very… special child,” The Counselor said. He showed himself out. Tucker held Theta out in front of him.

“Special? Man, is no one on this ship normal?” he asked. Theta, in lieu of proper response, giggled and made grabby hands for Tucker’s face. “Yeah. You are fuckin’ special,” Tucker mumbled, pulling him back close to his body. “Hey, he’s gone, you can come out,” he called to the others. After a minute the door slid open and Gamma and Carolina came out of the room.

“Caboose got his head stuck in the drawer again,” Gamma said, a tattler as always. Carolina gave him a look, like he’d betrayed his troop.

“Oh. My. God,” Tucker groaned, setting Theta down on the blanket they’d spread over the floor and heading into the bedroom to free Caboose.

 


	3. Chapter 3

He didn’t bring up the Counselor’s news until they were eating, because that was when he had the most power. The guy who brought them food rations had dropped off a box of cookies a day or so earlier, and now Tucker had the powerful bargaining tool of dessert to keep the kids in line.

“So how would you guys feel if another kid came and lived with us?”

“What?” Carolina said, dropping her fork.

“Bad,” Caboose said.

“Who?” Gamma asked. Theta smacked a handful of cheerios onto the counter. Tucker chewed and swallowed before answering any questions.

“There’s another kid on the ship, and he’s probably gonna come live with us. We got an extra bunk and everything.”

“What?” Carolina said again, less like a question and more like an accusation.

“Will he be taller than me?” Caboose asked. “Because I want to still be the tallest.”

“Caboose, you’re not the tallest now,” Tucker said. Carolina stood a good few inches higher than him.

“Oh. Then I do not mind if he lives with us,” Caboose said.

“What’s his name?” Gamma asked, eyes wide. He looked oddly interested. And oddly earnest. Usually when Gamma was asking questions he was just trying to set up a knock knock joke. Tucker had already suffered through a full day of _“Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?”_ Until Carolina decked him, and Tucker sent everyone to time out.

“Delta,” Tucker said.

“Oh.” Gamma looked down at his food, like that cleared up any interest he had.

“Hey, you guys both have weird names. Theta too. Are you related or something?”

“Yes. He’s my brother,” Gamma said, like it wasn’t important.

“Oh. Theta too?”

“Yes.” Gamma got down from his chair without saying anything else, and walked off to their room. After a second or two, Tucker heard him start up his game. Carolina threw her fork at the wall. It clanged off and landed in the sink. Then she stomped off into their room. Tucker wondered if she’d meant for it to land like that, because if so, he was seriously impressed. He ducked his head in their room a few minutes later and found them sitting on opposite ends of it, Carolina furious scribbling in one of her workbooks, and Gamma intently focused on his game. He felt someone tugging at his pants.

“Mr. Tucker, can I have dessert?” Caboose asked. Tucker rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, sure. And seriously Caboose. Just call me Tucker.”

  

Delta and Gamma really were brothers. In fact, they looked like twins. When the Counselor arrived the next day to drop Delta off, Tucker couldn’t stop staring. The only thing that set them apart, aside from Delta’s bright green eyes being so starkly different from Gamma’s sky blue, was the fact that Gamma always had this kind of smug expression on his face, where Delta looked more like a shaken etch-a-sketch.

Carolina, who had been in a pretty good mood, playing with Caboose and Theta on the floor with all the spoons from the kitchen (that Tucker was going to have to wash later, and they hadn’t asked before getting out) but as soon as she heard the door she retreated into the bedroom. The doors didn’t slam, because they were automated and sliding, but Tucker knew a furious button-push when he saw one. Tucker made sandwiches, which Gamma turned his nose up at but Delta politely accepted one of, and he sat Caboose at the counter and Theta in his high chair to get everyone acquainted.

Theta liked him. Caboose hated him. Apparently Carolina wasn’t the only one who had new baby syndrome, which was ridiculous in the first place because there was already a literal baby. So Theta rolled cheerios in Delta’s direction and laughed and clapped when Delta picked them up and pointedly put them back in Theta’s bowl, and Caboose ate his sandwich and scowled in Delta’s general direction.

When he was done, Delta asked if he could be excused to use the facilities. Tucker stared at him blankly. He was about to say “What facilities?” when Delta clarified that he meant the washroom. He was scary polite. And he seemed smart too, not just polite. Polite was something you trained into kids, it was a surface thing. There was something about Delta, the way he watched the others. It was… calculating. Not that Gamma wasn’t smart too. But Gamma didn’t use his brains for social obligations, he used them for… well mostly knock knock jokes, but something tricking Caboose or trying to beat Carolina at games.

Caboose picked at his sandwich. Tucker sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face.

“Is it really that bad to have another kid come live with us?” Tucker asked, as Theta ground up cheerios in his chubby fists. Caboose pushed his sandwich crusts around on his plate. Tucker picked up one of them and ate it, because nothing spurred Caboose into eating things he didn’t want to eat like the threat of someone else eating them. But this time he just stayed frowning at his plate, with that betrayed look on his face.

“Gamma  and Delta are brothers,” Caboose said.

“Yeah, so?”

“So now Gamma will want to play the quiet game with Delta. And ride bikes with him, and go fishing with him, and play cards with him… and who will I do those things with?”

“Caboose I’m pretty sure you guys have never done any of those things. Except the quiet game. And maybe the cards.”

“But now Gamma will not want to do them with me!” Caboose wailed.

“Caboose, I don’t think Gamma would want to do those things anyways,” Tucker said. But Caboose’s dejected look was kind of… painful, so he amended. “But if he did, I’m sure he’d still want to do them with you.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. For sure buddy. And um, you know, Caboose, you can always hang out with me, too,” Tucker said. The door slid open and Delta returned from the washroom. “Hey, Caboose, why don’t you get out your paper and markers and you guys can draw. Delta, you like drawing?”

“Like is a relative term. I… do not dislike drawing.” Tucker frowned. Previous to meeting Delta he wouldn’t have been able to picture a kid weirder than Caboose. But here he was.

“Well, o-kay. I’m gonna put Theta to bed,” Tucker said. He kicked the other kids out of the bedroom and into the main room. When Theta finally stopped crying every time Tucker put him down in the crib and fell asleep, Tucker found Gamma and Carolina sitting on opposite ends of the couch (Carolina the furthest from Delta) Gamma immersed in his video game and Carolina working on her math problems again.

Delta and Caboose were drawing though. After he sent everyone to bed, Tucker looked through their drawings. Caboose was doing pictures of tanks again. Delta’s drawing was some kind of complex machinery schematic. Tucker frowned at it for a while, and concluded that he was too stupid too even begin to understand it. He put the drawings and supplies away and unfolded the couch bed.

  

Some time deep in the night he woke up to the sound of the door sliding open, and the light from the bathroom spilling out over his face. He squinted in the dark, and saw two small figures, silhouetted, carrying a bulky bundle of something _. I should get up, the kids are up,_ he thought, but his limbs were too tired and heavy to move. So instead he listened.

“You are sure it’s okay?” That was Caboose. Now he really felt like he should get up.

“I estimate that the chances Private Tucker will be woken are low. We can put the sheets down the laundry chute, and retrieve new ones from the cupboard.” And that was Delta.

“Yeah, it was an accident. I do not normally wet the bed. Its just that some of us had some scary dreams. And some of us got very scared.”

“Wetting the bed at your age makes you statistically average,” Delta said, kind of robotically. But Tucker got the feeling he meant it in a nice way.

“Oh well. That’s good I like to be average.”

“Here, take these,” he heard Delta saying.

“Wow, there were sheets in here? No way!” Caboose said. Tucker drifted back to sleep.

  

After two days of normal (or what could pass as normal when it came to Tucker’s life) things got weird again. It started, as was becoming a regular occurrence, with someone ringing their doorbell buzzer thing.

Tucker was crouched over by the couch trying to scrub Caboose’s weird friendship drawings off the walls.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” he groaned, getting up.

“That is hardly appropriate language to use in front of children,” Delta said.

“I would be concerned if there were any children present,” Tucker said. Delta’s lip twitched, like he was tempted to laugh but rose above the urge. “You sure know how to sneak up on a guy,” he added.

“I believe the door is for me.”

“I got it,” Caboose yelled, as the buzzer sounded again, and he came skidding into the room and slammed the button. The door slid open and… wow. All this time wearing like, clothes and Tucker had forgotten how fucking tall people in power armor were. Tall and imposing. He sort of expected Caboose to be afraid of them. Which of course, he was not.

“Hey, you guys are huge guys!” Caboose cried, like he was talking to Santa or some shit. Not even. Kids were usually afraid of Santa.

The guy in the gold armor did this kind of half-wave at Delta. The guy behind him, grey with yellow accents, hung back a little, like he was kind of uncomfortable striding into a room full of children in his giant death machine armor.

“You must be Private Tucker,” Gold armor guy said. “I’m Agent York.”

“Right. The guy Delta works with.”

“Yeah, that’s me. How you doing buddy?”

“My needs are adequately satisfied here.”

“Thanks, nothing like the glowing endorsement of ‘adequate.’” Tucker said, trying not to roll the cloth back and forth in his hands too much. He didn’t want to look nervous in front of these guys. He was a solider too, once.

“Can I try on your helmet?” Caboose asked. He was trying to climb the grey guy’s leg. It was hard to gauge emotions through a visor, but Tucker knew terror when he saw it.

“Oh yeah, Delta, this is Agent Washington.”

“Hello Agent Washington.”

“D’s been helping me with lock picking,” York explained. Tucker nodded. Where he was in the couch, deposited in the baby carrier, Theta started crying. Probably because no one was paying attention to him. Tucker went to pick him up and spotted Gamma and Carolina peering out at York and Washington from the door. Caboose, who was a lot stronger than he looked (with his little noodly arms) had scaled his way up to Washington’s chest piece.

“Um, York? Help? Babysitter guy?” Washington asked. York was just laughing.

“Tucker,” Tucker said.

“Well we gotta get going, but maybe we should leave you here, huh Wash?” York said. “You’ve already made friends.” Tucker rolled his eyes and finally took pity on Wash.

“Caboose, get down.”

“But I want to try on his helmet,” Caboose insisted. “So we can be helmet friends!”

“If you don’t get down you’re not gonna get dessert later,” Tucker said. For once, Caboose actually listened and dropped down.

“Wow. Uh, thanks,” Wash said. Tucker shrugged.

“Caboose, why don’t you go get your coloring stuff?” Tucker asked. “And include paper in the stuff. Paper is what we use for coloring on.”

“Paper and also walls.”

“Not walls. Not Gamma. Not Theta. Just paper.”

“Theta is puking on your shirt,” Caboose said, and then dashed off to find his coloring stuff.

“Oh, fuck, not again,” Tucker groaned, peeling Theta away from him. “I thought you were done with this,” he said.

“That’s Theta?” Wash asked. Tucker looked up at him.

“Uh, yes? Why?” York, who had been talking to Delta, elbowed Wash.

“We should get going,” he said. “We’ll bring him back in one piece,” York added, and the idea that they might bring him back any other way suddenly chilled Tucker to the bone. But he let them go anyways, watched the door slide shut behind them.

“You guys like Delta, right?” He asked. Caboose, back with the drawing supplies, nodded.

“Delta and I are best friends. He likes me a lot,” Caboose said.

“Right. Gamma? Carolina?”

“He’s fine,” Carolina said grudgingly from the doorway. Gama merely shrugged.

“He’s okay,” he said, like he was talking about socks instead of his brother. Close enough, Tucker figured.

“What do you guys wanna eat?” he asked. They wanted macaroni. Gamma protested eating altogether. Tucker wondered if he should just stop asking.

  

When Delta arrived back he was escorted not by York, but by some random guard. It was so late Tucker had been asleep on the couch, but he jerked awake at hearing the door. Delta stepped inside quietly, and waved goodbye to the guard. Tucker got up and walked over to sit at the counter, watching Delta quietly and carefully remove his shoes.

“How was it?” Tucker asked.

“I performed well. Agent York is still not focusing enough when he attempts lock picks.”

“Okay,” Tucker said. What was he supposed to say? It was like talking to a real polite computer. I want to speak to Delta, not the help desk, he wanted to say. Instead he said: “Do you want something to eat?”

“No thank you, I have had sufficient food for today. I think I will go to bed now.”

“Hey Delta?” Tucker said, before Delta could take off to the bedroom. He paused. “You’re okay, right? Everything is okay?”

“I am not sure what you mean by ‘everything.’” Delta said. Then he paused, like he knew he was just being obnoxious. “I am fine, Tucker. Nothing is wrong,” he said. Tucker nodded and watched him retreat into the darkness of the bedroom. He went back to the couch and fell asleep.

 

When he woke up, someone was prodding him in the face.

“Tucker, get up. Get up, get up,” Carolina was insisting. It was odd for her to get that riled up about anything, so Tucker opened his eyes.

“What’s wrong? Did Caboose get stuck in the freezer?”

“No.”

“The sink?”

“You have to get up. It’s Monday,” Carolina said.

“So?”

“So the director is coming.” Tucker sat up in bed.


	4. Chapter 4

Once he had retrieved Theta and insisted about breakfast, he convinced Carolina to explain. Apparently, every first Monday of the month, the Director himself visited. He usually came a couple more Mondays, but the first Monday was the only day he could be absolutely relied on to show up. As Caboose sleepily spooned cheerios into his mouth and Gamma flicked bran flakes at Delta’s head, Carolina drummed her fingers on the countertop. Her eyes were fixed on the door, but now and again they would flick over to her workbook, resting on the counter, full of torn out pages and perfect, triple checked equations.

By lunch time, Tucker had developed doubts.

“He’s coming,” Carolina assured him sharply, when he suggested that maybe the Director was just really busy this Monday. “He might be late, but he always comes,” she added. Caboose and Delta were building a tower of cards, or rather, Delta was building a tower of cards, Caboose was watching and not breaking it, and Gamma was throwing cards their direction until he knocked it over and Delta had to start again. Theta was chewing on his hands on the couch beside Tucker. Carolina watched the game from beside Theta, hungrily, like a starving man outside a bakery.

“You can play with them you know,” Tucker said. “We won’t miss the door or anything.” Carolina shook her head. She thumbed the corners of her workbook and said nothing.

After dinner, when Tucker came back from putting Theta down for the night and found Caboose asleep on the floor after winning probably his hundredth round of the quiet game, and Delta and Gamma engaged in a soft conversation that suspiciously fell silent when he approached, he really hated the Director. Carolina was still sitting on the couch, but her straight-backed, soldier’s posture was gone, replaced with the slump of a tired child.

He sent the others to the bed. When he came back from the commotion of brushing teeth and putting on pajamas he sat down on the couch beside Carolina and had no idea what to say. His dad had died when he was a little kid. He didn’t know him. But it wasn’t like he went through years of having him dangled in front of him. There was no notion of missing something. He was just gone. Vanished. Not absent by choice. It had to hurt more, he thought. And then, terribly, he thought of the thing, bawling in his arms, now dead or fatherless. He shut his eyes for a second, and resolved not to think about it.

“When I was a kid,” he started uselessly, but then the door opened, and in stepped the Director, and wow, he was scarier in real life somehow. Tucker had wanted to deck him in the face just seconds ago but now he was compelled to stand up straighter and address him as sir. Which is exactly what Carolina did. Her hands were clenched into fists, but she did it. Hopped off the couch and stood at attention.

“Sir,” she said, and then offered him her notebook. The Director took it without looking at it. Tucker glanced down at Carolina. She was frozen, standing stock still. Tucker had been so focused on the Director that he had failed to see who followed him in. Standing at his side was a girl with cropped blonde hair who had to be Carolina’s age, but she looked… she looked more like Delta and Gamma in features. Especially like Delta. She had that shaken etch-a-sketch expression, totally wiped blank.

“The other children?” the Director asked, in a southern accent that surprised Tucker. He blinked, registering that he was being asked a question.

“They’re asleep,” he said. “It’s way past their bedtime.”

“Of course,” the Director said, like he knew that and had been testing Tucker or something. “And there have been no… difficulties?” he asked.

“Does Caboose count as a difficulty?” Tucker asked. The Director just fixed him with a look. “Um, no. No difficulties,” Tucker said.

“Good to hear,” the Director said, turning to leave. The girl stayed where she was standing, looking at Carolina with a kind of mix of curiosity and… something else. Maybe that Gamma smugness.

“Tex. With me,” the Director said. When the door shut behind them, Carolina let out a shuddering breath.

“Carolina,” Tucker had time to say before she kicked over the coffee table. She didn’t scream, or yell, like kids normally did when they were mad. Just that one, brutal action. Then she marched off and locked herself in the bathroom. After many attempts to get her to open the door, Tucker had to enlist Delta (who was a light sleeper and had woken up anyways) to pick the lock. Caboose and Gamma slept like rocks, but Theta had woken up too, and Tucker was bouncing him on his knee outside the door as he watched Delta’s small fingers play nimbly at the hologram, until the door clicked and opened.

“Wow, you’re good,” Tucker said.

“I am better than agent York,” Delta informed him. “But I think I will return to bed,” he added. Tucker nodded to him. He entered the bathroom carefully. Carolina was sitting in the tub, clothed and dry, biting her nails. Tucker sat down on the edge of the tub.

“I’m sorry,” he just said.

“I don’t understand,” Carolina said, and her voice was thick with almost-tears.

“He cares about you, he’s just…” Tucker cast around for an appropriate lie.

“Just what? If he cared about me, if he _cares_ , about me, why does he need to make all of them? All of these stupid… _copies_?” Carolina cried. Tucker froze.

“Copies?”

“Delta, Gamma, Theta, and now… _her_!” Carolina said.

“Carolina, what do you mean, copies?” Tucker asked. Then something hit the ship, and the lights went out.

 

Within seconds, the emergency lights came up, filling the bathroom with a red glow. Theta was bawling, but he was barely audible over the blaring alarms.

“What the fuck?” Tucker blurted out, and then, seeing Carolina looking up at him with big scared green eyes, tried to compose himself. “Come on, out of the tub,” he said. Carolina followed him out of the bathroom. Caboose, Gamma and Delta were all standing in the doorway to the bedroom, Caboose rubbing his eyes and Gamma clutching his video game to his chest.

“Tucker, what’s happening?” Caboose asked.

“I don’t know. Hang on,” Tucker said. He handed Theta, still wailing his head off to Carolina. “Go back in the bedroom, I’ll be right back,” he said.

“No,” Carolina said firmly.

“Carolina, please. I’ll be right back.”

“No.”

“Just trust me okay? I’ll be right back,” Tucker insisted. Carolina pulled Theta a little closer and nodded. “Lock the door behind me,” he added. Carolina’s mouth twisted. Out in the hallway the alarms were even louder. Tucker walked warily, wishing he still had his power armor. He bumped into a guard at the end of the hall and almost got shot in the face for it.

“Whoa whoa, don’t shoot,” he said, holding his hands up. The guy lowered his gun.

“Oh man. It’s just you. You’re the babysitter guy, right?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Tucker said, rolling his eyes a little. “What’s going on, are we under attack?”

“My buddy from upstairs just radioed me that the ship fired on _itself_. I got no idea what the fuck is going—hey!” The guy never finished his sentence, because someone shot him in the head. The spray of blood hit Tucker in the face. He blinked in shock. There was some guy’s blood in his mouth. The shooter was a few feet away in black armor, gun arm still raised. Well fuck, Tucker thought. This is a shitty way to die. The shooter cocked their head at him, and lowered the gun.

“Grab that guy’s rifle and get back in your room,” she said. There was another explosion, sounded like it came from somewhere inside the ship. The lights flickered off again. When they came back up she was gone. Tucker grabbed the rifle and got the fuck back to the room.

“Carolina, it’s me,” he said, hammering on the door.

“What’s the passcode?” Caboose called through the intercom.

“We don’t have one!” Tucker shouted.

“Yes we do!” Caboose insisted.

“Passcode?” Tucker hazarded. The door opened to reveal Caboose clinging to Delta’s arm, Gamma clutching his game, and Carolina holding Theta and looking seriously pissed. Which Tucker knew by now meant scared for her, but it was still kinda intimidating. She was the most intimidating kid he’d ever met.

“You have a gun,” she said.

“Uh, yeah,” Tucker said, stepping inside and shutting the door. “Let’s get away from the door,” he said. He deemed the bathroom to be the room with the least objects to crush them in the event of a crash, and herded the kids in there. Caboose clung to his shirt.

The ship crashed. Tucker hit his head on the sink when it was happening, so the events got a little bit blurry. Caboose was crying. Theta was crying. Gamma and Delta were silent, holding hands. And Carolina held onto Tucker’s arm and one of the pipes on the wall with a death grip, but she didn’t cry. She barely blinked.

Tucker knew they had to have crashed because after the impact the shaking and shuddering of the ship halted entirely. And the alarms stopped blaring.

“Everyone alive?” Tucker asked. Theta was still crying, so that was a yes for him.

“I’m pretty sure I am alive,” Caboose said.

“Yes,” Carolina said kind of distantly.

“Gamma and I are unharmed, but you appear to have sustained a head injury, Tucker,” Delta said.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Tucker said, standing up shakily. He touched a hand gingerly to his temple, where the sink had opened a gash. Blood was running down the side of his face. He opened the door and then stopped, because someone was opening it from their side. He grabbed the rifle off the floor, pointing it at the dark-armored intruder. But it wasn’t the woman from the hallway. It was Agent Washington, the guy who worked with York.

“Tucker! You’re alive!”

“Yeah, what the fuck is happening?”

“Listen, you have the take the kids and—augh!” he stopped, clutched his helmet and dropped to his knees.

“Um, Agent Washington? Washington?” Tucker asked. He moved towards him, one hand outstretched, unsure what to do. His armor didn’t look damaged. There was nothing visibly wrong with him. “Washington?” Tucker tried again. The only response he got was an anguished scream that cut off in a gurgle. Then the UNSC troops busted in.


	5. Chapter 5

They questioned everyone. That was the first thing that happened. Well, the real first thing was that they hauled Washington away on a stretcher and they started picking up all the bodies and they took Tucker and the kids off the ship and into some temporary base but after that, they questioned everyone.

They wouldn’t tell him anything or explain what had happened. All they would say was that the Director had been arrested. The questions to Tucker were probing and obnoxious, but not hard to answer. They basically wanted to know if he’d been aware of what was happening. And at the time, he still hadn’t finished putting all the pieces together, so it was really easy to honestly admit to them that he had no idea what was going on. In the next room, the kids were crying. He could hear them through the door, some guard trying to shush Theta and Caboose sobbing, that loud, drawn out wail he did when he was hurting and wanted someone to pay attention to him.

“What happened to Agent Washington?” Tucker asked the woman who’d been questioning him.

“We’re still figuring that out.”

“Give me your best guess.”

“The Director and his staff were developing a combat enhancement serum by altering the DNA of a set of clones in utero. Once the clones were older, they would distill the serum from a sample of their blood. He was testing it on his own agents. Washington was one of the last subjects.”

“And it… did what to him?”

“The serum Washington received seems to have been designed to increase memory retention capabilities.”

“So it did… not that.”

“Not that.”

“And what about the other agents? What about the other clone?”

“Agents North and York escaped with the young clone Tex, as well as Eta and Iota. Her adult counterpart is dead,” The woman closed the file, pinching the bridge of her nose. _Yeah, this day must be so hard for you with all the paperwork,_ Tucker thought. _I got a guy’s blood in my mouth. I found out I’ve been babysitting magical super-soldier clones._ “Agents South and Wyoming took off with Sigma and Omega. So we still have the issue of Church.”

“Church?”

“We found one more clone on the ship. He won’t tell us his real name. Say’s he’s called Church. He keeps demanding to talk to Agent Tex.”

“What’s going to happen to the kids?” Tucker asked, trying not to bite his lip. He wished he had power armor on again. It made it so easy to not look nervous.

“The remaining clones?”

“The kids. Gamma, Delta, Caboose, Theta. Carolina,” Tucker said. The woman ran a hand through her hair.

“I’m going to level with you Tucker. You seem like a good guy. Just a soldier caught up in all this. And you clearly didn’t know anything about what was going on. We don’t have the resources to get these kids shipped off to a proper care facility. The foster system doesn’t want them. If you’re willing to take a pay cut, you can keep your current job. You’ll just be employed by the UNSC instead. We’ll set you up with a place here, or in a nearby colony.”

“So you mean… keep the kids?” Tucker asked. He saw her eyes flick down to the file, just for a second and he felt ice in his gut. Does she know? He wondered. How much information is written in there? But he didn’t say anything. Like with the Counselor, he figured he was better off just not knowing.

“You can keep the kids, Private Tucker. You would be… their guardian.” He should have thought about it a lot longer, and more carefully, and weighed the pros and cons, and considered that he was like, never, ever going to pick up any chicks in some lame colony with a pile of kids clinging to his leg, but he didn’t.

“Yeah, okay. Deal,” he said. The woman smiled like thank god, for once something was going her way.

“Excellent. There’s just one more condition,” she added.

“What condition?”

“We want you to take Church.”

 

They let Tucker check in with the kids, get them settled in the temporary base they were staying in. It was all cots and guys with guns wandering in and out, but it honestly wasn’t that different from their old home. They were shaken up from the crash, but they weren’t that upset. At some point one of the medics had put a bandage on Tucker’s head, and Caboose climbed into his lap as soon as he got the chance, asking if he was fixed.

“I’m fine, okay?” Tucker said. Caboose’s hand was tight on his shirt.

“You would not lie to me, would you, Private Tucker?” he asked.

“No. I wouldn’t,” Tucker said. He went to ruffle Carolina’s hair. She batted his hand away before he even got close.

“You okay?” he asked. Beside them, Delta and Gamma slept on two cots pushed up side by side.

“He’s going to jail.”

“Looks like it.”

“He’s a bad person.”

“Well he was… he thought he was doing a good thing. I think.”

“Maybe if I had been better, he wouldn’t have—”

“Carolina.”

“Because he wouldn’t have needed—”

“ _Carolina_. That’s not true. This isn’t about you. Your dad made mistakes, he fucked up, but you’re a good kid. This isn’t your fault, dude.”

“I think that you are pretty awesome,” Caboose added. A kind of… well not a smile, but almost a smile caught Carolina’s lips. Like she was fighting it off. Because she was mad and everything was wrong and she didn’t want to smile. But still, it was there.

“Listen guys, some of the other agents took off with Tex, and they’re looking for her but… one of the other clones is still here,” Tucker said. Carolina looked up at him.

“Is he nice?” Caboose asked, seeming to sense where this was going.

“They said I can… I can be the one to take care of you guys. But we have to take Church.”

“His name is Church?” Caboose asked. Carolina said nothing. She pursed her lips.

“Carolina?” Tucker asked.

“I don’t care what you do,” she said. The smile had slipped away.

 

Church didn’t really look quite like the others. He had a similar face, but his hair was jet black and his ice blue eyes were ringed with dark circles. They had him in a room on his own, and he was just sitting on the bed with his hands in his lap, staring off into space. He looked like a robot someone had pulled the power switch on. Tucker shuffled in awkwardly with his hands stuffed in his pockets. He didn’t know how to talk to kids. Okay, so he knew how to talk to his kids— _the kids_ , he amended quickly in his head. But not kids in general.

“Hey, uh, Church, right? They said you wouldn’t tell anyone your real name.”

“My real name is Church, asshole.”

“Whoa, okay,” Tucker said, raising his hands. That wasn’t really what he expected.

“They won’t tell me what happened to Tex.”

“Agent Tex?”

“Yeah, of course Agent Tex you moron. She was supposed to get me out of there. She said she was gonna get me off the ship.”

“Well you’re off it now.”

“Thanks, I noticed.” He looked down at his lap. Tucker took a few cautious steps closer. “She said she was gonna get me out. She said they were lying.”

“Lying about what?”

“They said if I didn’t make the calculations, something bad would happen. They said people would die because of me. So I kept working, and I kept doing them, but they kept getting harder and harder and they told me I was a genius, that I was supposed to be able to do them, but they just—they kept getting harder and I needed more time, but they said… Tex said she would get me out.”

There was a line of track marks on his arm and Tucker remembered, horribly, them saying that they had been making the enhancement serum from the clones blood. How much blood did they mean? How many times did they have to sample it?

“When am I gonna see her?” Church asked, looking up at him.

“Church, Agent Tex is dead,” Tucker said. Church’s face just shut down. It was like someone had flicked a switch.

“Get out,” he said.

“Church, I—”

“Get out, asshole! You fuckstick! Get the fuck out, right fucking now!” Church yelled. Tucker got the fuck out. He heard something hit the closed door behind him, like Church had hurled the nearest object at the wall.

 

The UNSC set them up in a living space that was actually a converted military base. It was on the edge of this colony and it was mostly full of soldiers with nothing to do. Actually, it was mostly full of no one. The soldiers kept to themselves, and the few civilians living in the nearby areas were a good half hour drive away. One of the UNSC officials got them moved in, wrangled some soldiers to carry some supplies over, and then they were basically as alone as they’d been on the Mother of Invention. After several days of being questioned and crammed up with all the medics and scientists and pissed off government officials, it was kind of nice to be alone with just the kids again.

Kind of. Well. Almost. Their opinions on the new base were mixed at best. Caboose loved it, Gamma hated it, Delta declared it an adequate living space, and Carolina and Church were both sullen and indifferent. It was good enough for Theta to shit his diaper in, so he apparently had no complaints.

The first few nights were actually the easiest. Everyone was still sort of shell shocked. The kids ate whatever crappy food Tucker could mash together from their supplies, everyone went to bed on time. The rules and the routine were the only thing keeping everyone in line.

For the first two nights, Church did not sleep. Tucker went into their room and navigated their new, more beat up UNSC issue bunk beds to check on Theta and make sure Caboose hadn’t wet the bed, and when he looked up he locked eyes with Church, sitting up in bed, staring out at the wall, silent, but totally awake. He blinked once. Tucker shivered, but willed himself not to just back out. _This is your job now, you agreed to this, he reminded himself. You can’t put your all in for some of them but not others._

He sat down on the end of Church’s bed, the lower bunk. Above him, Delta snored lightly.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked.

“Fuck off,” Church mumbled.

“You seriously have a hell of a mouth for a kid.”

“I’m not a kid,” Church said.

“Fine, whatever. You should go to sleep, you know. Sleep is like, mandatory for human survival.”

“I’m not human,” Church said.

“I don’t know what they told you… in there, but you are. You’re human. And you’re alive. And you’re a kid. And you have to sleep,” Tucker said. Church lay down in the bed, but when Tucker glanced back from the doorway, he could see a pair of ice blue eyes still watching him.

He tried not to worry about it. He’d have to sleep eventually, right?

 

The next morning at breakfast Church drooped over a bowl of cheerios, Carolina chewed mechanically and refused to speak, and Theta upended his bowl over the floor. Tucker wanted to cry, or at least lock himself in a room and break something.

“I saw a mop in the supply cupboard,” Delta said. Tucker wanted to plant a kiss right on his stupid little greasy-haired head. At least he could count on Delta.

“Thanks, Delta,” he said.

“If you like, you can call me D,” Delta said. “It was Agent York’s nickname for me, but I would not mind if you used it.” There was a pointedness to that statement that Tucker did not miss. Delta missed York. Whatever they did to Church was seriously fucked, but it seemed like Delta didn’t get quite the same treatment.

“Okay, D,” Tucker said, heading to the cupboard to grab the mop. There was a thud from behind him at the table.

“Tucker!” Caboose shouted. Tucker turned around to see Church, fallen from his chair and lying on the floor. Carolina was standing up with her chair knocked up, like she had jumped up on instinct.

“Church?” Tucker cried, tearing across the room to get to him. _Shit, shit, shit, please don’t be brain damaged_ , he thought. _Please don’t be dead, I can’t have screwed up that badly already_ , a smaller, darker part of his brain added. Church opened his eyes after a few agonizingly long seconds.

“Tucker?” he asked, sounding genuinely confused.

“Hey, Church, you okay?” Tucker asked. Church sat up, rubbing his head.

“Huh? Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” Church asked.

“You fell,” Caboose said.

“Right out of your chair,” Carolina said.

“Like an idiot,” Gamma added.

“Hey, Gamma, shut up,” Tucker said. “Are you good?” Tucker asked.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” Church asked. There was a deadly, painful silence, where Church looked over Tucker’s face in innocent confusion.

“Because you fell,” Caboose said finally.

“Who fell?” Church asked.

“You did,” Gamma said.

“Ohhhh, my god,” Tucker groaned, burying his face in his hands. Church blinked.

“Why am I on the floor?” he asked.

“Tucker, I think we should seek medical assistance,” Delta said. “He probably has sustained some kind of brain damage,” he added.

“You don’t say, Delta,” Tucker said.

“Who has brain damage?” Church asked. Theta started wailing and Tucker realized, not for the first time, that he had bitten off way more than he could chew.


	6. Chapter 6

“See? It lights up green for mild concussion,” the Doc was saying. Tucker took a deep breath and resisted the urge to yell.

“Didn’t you just say it lit up green for broken bones?”

“It lights up green for a lot of things. But I can tell. There are subtle differences.”

“So he’s okay?”

“So who’s okay?” Church asked.

“I’m not talking to you. Doc? He’s… going to be okay?”

“I told you, I’m actually a medic. But yeah, he should be fine. Just have him… I don’t know, walk it off.”

“He fainted, that’s how this happened in the first place.” Expression utterly puzzled, Church’s fingers scrunched up the paper on the exam table he was sitting on. He didn’t like being out of the loop, Tucker could tell. Also, in a few seconds, he would forget that Tucker had told him to be quiet.

“So he got a little rattled, mentally. It’ll probably wear off in a while. Just make sure he rests. Give him some juice. I don’t know.”

“Wow, I’m not paying for this medical advice, am I?” Tucker asked, scratching at his arm absentmindedly. The… not the smell, something else, the air maybe, of medical buildings still made him uncomfortable. He could almost taste the scent of biofoam, thick and sweet and metallic in his mouth, could almost feel that emptiness of his gut torn open. Like he’d been turned inside out. Like something was missing, even something that wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.

“You actually are. It’s gonna be twenty dollars,” Doc said, snapping him back to the present.

“What’s twenty dollars?” Church asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tucker groaned. “Come on, let’s go,” he said.

“Okay, where are we going?” Church asked.

Outside the medical building Tucker finally felt like he could breathe again. He grabbed Church’s hand to keep him from wandering off or falling over again or something. He didn’t tug his hand away or anything, which was what scared Tucker the most. This wasn’t the kid who had thrown stuff at the wall when he heard Texas was dead. The kid who seemed to have a vocabulary made up primarily of swearwords.

 

Tucker had gotten him up off the floor and put him on the couch, where he just sat, looking kind of dazed. Delta rushed off to the one computer console in their base. It was password protected to keep the kids from using it, but obviously that didn’t stop him.

“The nearest medical building is only a short distance from here, and a tram system of transport is set up to move colonists and military personnel,” Delta informed him.

“Okay, can you draw me a map or something?” Tucker asked.

“I’m already printing one,” Delta called from the next room.

“Caboose, can you find Church’s shoes for me?” Tucker asked. Caboose nodded and took off. Carolina had sat back down in her seat by now, and was watching Church with a mixed expression. If he had to guess, Tucker would have placed it somewhere between pity and anger.

“What’s going on, why is everyone running?” Church asked.

“Because you hit your head,” Gamma said boredly, not looking up from his game.

“Someone has to watch you guys if I’m taking him to the medical building,” Tucker said, standing up.

“I can watch us,” Carolina said.

“Okay well watch everyone for like, two minutes for me, I’ll be right back,” Tucker said. Carolina nodded, putting a new handful of cheerios on Theta’s high chair as if to demonstrate her babysitting abilities.

Tucker left their building and headed to the next apartment down. He hammered on the door. He was hoping for some nice colonists. An old lady perhaps. Even a random off-duty UNSC soldiers would do. What he got, when the door opened, was Agent Washington of the Mother of Invention. Freelancer, and apparently now guy-next-door. He knew it was him because he was holding his helmet in his hand. Which would have been odd but in the room behind him Tucker could see that he had laid out his armor for cleaning and repairs.

“Agent… Washington. This is a weird coincidence,” he said.

“Tucker?” Washington was surprisingly good looking under his helmet. Tucker was a little shocked by the blonde, but hey, a man’s hair dye decisions are his own, he supposed. Probably people didn’t see the guy with his helmet off a lot.

“So the UNSC dumped me here because I agreed to keep looking after the kids, but what are you doing here?” Tucker asked.

“I’m stationed out here awaiting orders from—wait, you’re still looking after the clones?’

“The kids, yeah. I actually need your help.”

“My help? You didn’t even know I was here a minute ago.”

“Well I was looking for a neighbor, but you’re it apparently. I need someone to watch the kids.”

“Well I’m obviously not qualified—”

“I know I don’t know you, but it’s an emergency. I seriously wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t. One of them fell out of his chair and hit his head, I have to take him to get looked at and Carolina acts like she can take care of them but she’s not old enough and she might… I don’t know, lose interest or get in a fight with Gamma or something and I just… I don’t know, I’m kind of in over my head.”

“I’ll say.”

“Please, Washington?”

“Yeah, okay, I’m coming,” Washington said, grabbing his keys off a hook by the door. “You can just call me Wash, by the way,” he added. “And for the record, I know nothing about child care.”

“Well I know next to nothing, so I wouldn’t worry that much. Just trying to keep the crying to a minimum and don’t let Caboose set himself on fire again.”

“How do I get them to stop crying—hold on, again?”

“I meant you. Try not to cry too much. You shouldn’t show any weakness,” Tucker said.

“I immediately regret agreeing to this,” Wash said.

 

They waited for the tram back from the medical building.

“How’s your head? Does it hurt?” Tucker asked.

“Kind of. What happened?’

“You hit it on the floor. You’ve asked me that like five times. Also, I think the lady in the office thought I hit you or something. She gave me a really dirty look. I was about to bust out a pickup line too.”

“You wouldn’t hit me,” Church said, with the kind of unbridled confidence that made Tucker feel like maybe he wasn’t doing as shitty a job at this as he thought.

“You know Church, I’m uh… I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Tucker said. The tram pulled up, brakes squealing and whining.

“It’s okay. I just wish…” Church trailed off.

“Church?”

“Huh?”

“Nevermind. Come on, let’s go home.”

 

Well, Wash had, if nothing else, kept Caboose from setting himself on fire. Or anyone else. So there was that. All the pots and pans had been pulled out of the cupboard, their precious toilet paper was strewn over the floor, and Gamma was sitting on top of the fridge.

“What the fuck happened?” Tucker asked.

“I don’t know,” Wash said, with a desperate kind of break in his voice. It wasn’t actually as bad to clean up as it looked. Tucker put Church to bed (he was practically asleep on his feet already) and put everyone in time out, with the exception of Theta. Carolina protested, but Tucker refused to hear any of it. Carolina could reign in the others when she really wanted to, so if the place was trashed, so she’d probably let them trash the place to mess with Washington. She really didn’t like new people.

“Can I offer you a drink?” Tucker suggested, while Wash was edging for the door. He owed him, and he couldn’t really imagine how to make it up. Tin of armor polish? “I don’t have any booze but there’s… some milk. And some really old coffee.”

“Um, sure, why not. I’d like some milk.”

“Okay, you got it dude,” Tucker said, grabbing it out of the fridge. He poured them each a glass. Wash took a swig and grimaced.

“Wow, it’s terrible,” he said.

“Well yeah, it’s powdered.”

“Right, yeah.”

“Listen, there’s actually something I wanted to ask you,” Tucker said, taking another swig of milk. It wasn’t that bad when it was cold, he’d decided recently. Wash eyed him nervously.

“If it’s more babysitting, I’m busy,” he said.

“Dude, I told you. It was an emergency. It won’t happen again. I was gonna ask you about the Mother of Invention.” Wash’s face crumpled into a scowl just at the mention, as if it was an involuntary response.

“What about it? I don’t really remember that much these days.”

“Right. They told me. But when you came in to the room, you were trying to warn me about something. You told me to get the kids and leave. Wash, did you know?”

“Did I know what?”

“About the clones. About… whatever they were doing to Church.”

“No. None of us did. It was agent Texas who found out. Tex was one of them. They made her age faster. It drove her insane. She was really losing it at the end. She was the one who told us. But it was right after I’d been injected with the serum and…”

“And everything went to fuck.”

“Yes. It did.” Wash clenched his fist. Tucker was worried his other hand would crush the glass he was holding. He should have given him one of the plastic cups he gave Caboose and Gamma. “They were using us as lab rats. All of us.” Tucker didn’t know what to say. Sure, he knew what it felt like to be used, but what was there to say? Yeah, life sucks. The military sucks.

“You know, you’re pretty good at this,” Wash said.

“What, babies? Babies aren’t hard.”

“No, I mean all of this. Kids.”

“Oh. I don’t know. I don’t think I’m really cut out for it. But I’m sure as hell trying.” 

“I should probably get out of here,” Wash said. He drained the milk from his glass and set it gently on the counter.

“Have a good night,” Tucker said. Wash’s answering laugh echoed as he stepped out the door.


	7. Chapter 7

In the morning, Church was less out of it. His short-term memory was still kind of fucked up, but less so. He carried longer conversations before forgetting what he was talking about. He had some of his bite back, snapping at Caboose for leaving out drawing supplies, mocking Tucker when water boiled over at the stove. Although he was essentially just growing more obnoxious, Tucker had to hide a smile each time he heard a swearword echo off the walls. So it was proving that ridiculous medic right, which he wasn’t all that happy about, but it was proving something else as well. He hadn’t screwed up that badly. He’d yet to screw up one of the kids that badly. Irreversibly badly.

Every now and then though, he’d catch Church voiding out not with that blank, wiped clean expression from before, but with his face hard, all his features scrunched together, looking far more adult than any kid should. Back when he was paying Doc the guy had leaned in a little closer and said: “I read the UNSC files. You know, it might not be so bad if this kid forgot some stuff.”

Yeah, it probably wouldn’t, Tucker figured. He was washing dishes and keeping an eye on Theta, eating mashed banana in his high chair when he felt someone tugging at his leg and looked down to see Caboose.

“Please don’t tell me something terrible has happened,” Tucker said, and then stopped and rethought it. “Actually, if something’s happened, tell me right now.”

“I made you this,” Caboose said. He was holding up a picture of… well it looked like a blob and a smaller, peach-toned blob, but it could in theory have been Tucker and Caboose. He glanced over to the crayons spilled over the floor. They were all broken and worn down to stubs. He really needed to buy Caboose like… some toys or something. And Theta. He needed baby toys. What if his brain didn’t grow because he had no toys?

“Hey uh, thanks Caboose. I’ll put it up on the fridge if I can find any magnets,” he said, taking the picture. Rather than darting back to his art supplies and Delta, who was sitting on the floor drawing some kind of very complex map in green crayon, Caboose hung around by the sink, watching Tucker wash dishes.

“You wanna help?” Tucker asked.

“Uh uh,” Caboose said. Tucker pulled a plate out of the water, dried it off and put it into the cupboard.

“You need something?” he asked. Caboose glanced over his shoulder at Delta, still avidly plotting his map, and Church, boredly rolling a blue crayon around the floor. He was getting wax on the concrete.

“Does Church like me?” Caboose asked. Tucker paused, wrist deep in dishwater, blanking on an answer. Did Church like him? There was no evidence that would support Church liking anyone. What would an adult say? Tucker wondered, ignoring the part of his brain reminding the rest of him that he _was_ an adult.

“Church is going through a rough time,” he said. That was useless, he thought. Caboose nodded sagely.

“I went through some rough times also once,” he said. There was a knock at the door. “I’m getting it!” Caboose yelled, and dashed off before Tucker could stop him. Fortunately, it was neither murderers nor the UNSC. It was Agent Washington. He looked disheveled as ever. When Tucker looked disheveled he looked like shit. Wash looked like an underwear model. He ran a hand through his hair nervously when Tucker came into view, holding Theta and trying to get him to stop added mashed banana to his shirt.

“Hey, Tucker, I hope it’s not a bad time.”

“Dude, I’m taking care of six kids, every time is a bad time. Uh, no offense Caboose.” Caboose wasn’t actually listening to him though it seemed, because he was trying to climb Wash again.

“Sorry. I was wondering if you have any coffee? Turns out the UNSC did have an assignment for me after all.”

“And let me guess: it’s terrible.”

“They want me to guard the wreckage. For the night shift. So pretty much, yeah.”

“Wreckage guarding? Weren’t you a super-soldier?” Tucker asked. Theta smacked a sticky hand into his ear.

“I was. Not anymore,” Wash said. His moment of broodiness was slightly ruined by the fact that Caboose was halfway up his leg. Kid was uncannily strong.

“I still think you are super Agent Washingtub!” Caboose said.

“Well I don’t have real milk but I do have real coffee. And by real I mean not decaf. It’s instant.”

“Fine by me,” Wash said gratefully.

“Here, hold this, I’ll make some,” Tucker said, thrusting Theta into his arms.

“Oh, um, I don’t know if—”

“Seriously dude, chill out. He’s not gonna bite you, he has like two teeth.”

“What if I drop him?”

“Sit down on the couch if you’re so worried,” Tucker said. Dragging Caboose (who was clung to his ankle) Wash made it over to the couch and sat down. Carolina pulled up her knees and scooted to the other side. Gamma stayed where he was. No one made Gamma move for anything. He could play video games with Caboose sat on him through the force of his sheer stubbornness.

“You worked for the Director,” Tucker heard Carolina say. He had his back turn, but he could hear Delta stop drawing. Gamma’s game got quieter, like he wasn’t pressing the buttons anymore.

“Yeah, I did,” Wash said.

“Was he a good boss?” Carolina asked.

“No. No he wasn’t,” Wash said. Carolina didn’t say anything else.

“Did you know Tex?” Tucker heard Church ask, and he froze reaching for a mug.

“Uh, yeah, a little,” Wash said. Silence reigned, punctuated only by the soft music emitting from Gamma’s game and Theta’s baby noises.

“Hey, Delta, why don’t you show Wash your drawings?” Tucker said, his hand closing around the mug.

“I’m not sure Agent Washington would be interested in my schematic drawings,” Delta said.

“Oh, I’d uh, I’d love to look at them,” Wash said.

“What about my drawings?” Caboose piped up.

“You show yours too,” Tucker said. He could see Wash visibly sag with relief. Wash drank his coffee in a hurry, handing Theta back and making for the door. Tucker would have been offended (a little) if it wasn’t for the way Wash paused and turned around as he was leaving.

“Hey, uh, thanks for this,” he said, suddenly all earnest and serious. Tucker didn’t know how to react. It was just coffee. Wash was talking like he’d freed him fro ma bear trap or something.

“It’s just coffee. But hey, you can owe me one. I’d love to cash in for more babysitting.”

“Haha. No, that’s fine. I’d really, really rather not,” Wash said. Then he waved and headed out. But as Tucker was shutting the door behind him he saw him glance back over his shoulder, kind of half grinning. It was this rare moment of sanity shared between them, through the craziness of everything. If it weren’t for Wash, by now Tucker would be genuinely insane. He’d have gone off the deep end. But as much as he needed Wash, to remember that there was an adult world out there, full of things that were not macaroni and sippy cups, he felt like Wash needed him too.

That night was a bad one for nightmares. Tucker was sitting at the kitchen counter going over his supply request forms when he heard crying from the bedroom and headed in to investigate. Tiptoeing through the dark he found Theta in his crib, still fast asleep, so he checked the bunk beds and found Carolina, hair damp with sweat, tears squeezing out of the sides of her eyes as she thrashed in her sleep.

He didn’t know what to do so he just tugged her down out of her bed and into his arms, and carried her out into the living room. She woke up at some point during the transit from the dark bedroom to the bright florescent lights, and fisted her hands in Tucker’s shirt. She was stocky for her age, but she was neither so big nor so heavy that Tucker couldn’t carry her pretty easily. He sat down on the couch with her in his arms.

It was like holding a cat that didn’t like people. For the moment, from shock, she was content to just sit in his arms, blinking in confusion, but you knew within seconds the animal would get its wits about it and squirm out of your arms. Which she did, after a moment. She wriggled out of his grip so she was sitting on the couch beside him, leaned up against his side so they were still touching.

“Something bad?” Tucker asked. She nodded. “You wanna talk about it?” he asked. She shook her head. “Okay.” They sat like that for a few minutes. She reached out and found his hand, curled her fingers around his pinky. “You’re okay,” Tucker said.

“I know,” she snapped. They sat like that a little longer. Then she let go, got up off the couch, and headed into the darkness of the bedroom.

About an hour later Tucker was mostly asleep on the couch, thinking that he should get up and make sure Gamma wasn’t playing his game under the blankets again, when he heard small footsteps, and looked up to see Church, like a deer caught in the headlights, clutching a blanket. There was a big wet patch in the middle. They stared at each other for a second, like Church was daring Tucker to say something.

“The fuck are you looking at?” he snapped. Tucker held up his hands.

“Nothing,” he said. Church looked down at the blanket in his hands. His face crumpled a little.

“The ceiling must be leaking, huh? Did it get on your bed?” Tucker asked. Church stared at him for a second. Please just let me help you, Tucker thought.

“Yeah. This place sucks. Shitty ceiling… dripped all over me.”

“Come on, I’ll help you clean it up,” Tucker said. After he’d stripped the sheets and replaced them, he watched Church climb back into bed.

“Okay, done,” he said, when a small hand shot out from under the blankets and found his.

“Stay with me?” Church whispered into the darkness, and Tucker froze, thinking of the living room and the peacefulness of just being alone with no kids. Church was shaking, just minutely. Tucker sat down on the end of his bed, then propped his legs up, leaned his back against the wall.

Church’s fingers found the edge of his shirt and clutched tight. He was too proud to admit it in front of the other kids. Where they were concerned, he hated Tucker. He was Church, and he didn’t need anyone. But in the dark, it seemed, fragments of memories were starting to come back to him, and he didn’t want to face them alone. No kid should have to go through this, Tucker thought. He fell asleep there. Hours into the night Church shoved him out of bed onto the floor.


	8. Chapter 8

Church woke up to someone watching him. It wasn’t a new feeling. Back on the Mother of Invention, someone was always watching him, waiting in the wings with needles or tests or something else painful. The new thing, was who was watching him. It was Carolina, the oldest, with the dyed flame red hair and the terrifyingly familiar scowl. The bedroom was empty except for them, and from the sound of things in the next room, breakfast was already well underway.

“What are you lookin’ at?” Church asked, sitting up and shoving the covers of his legs. They tumbled into her lap. She pushed them off delicately.

“You’ve been sleeping for ages,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Tucker told me to come get you.” With that, she got up off the end of his bed and marched out. The door slid shut behind her. Church sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes, scuffing his toes alone the cold concrete floor. Then he got up to get changed. His shirt was sticky on his back with sweat, so wet and cold that he worried he’d pissed himself, and would have to ask Tucker to change his sheets again. But when he ran a hand over the bed it was merely damp with sweat, the physical remainder from a night of terror.

Once dressed, he slunk out into the main room where Gamma and Caboose were sitting on the couch, playing some sort of game that involved clapping, and Carolina was eating a bowl of cereal, seated at the counter beside Delta and Theta. Church climbed into the empty chair between Delta and Carolina, and Tucker, who was scooping cereal into his mouth paused, swallowed and asked: “You want breakfast?”

“No, I came up here for the company, dipshit,” Church said, rolling his eyes. Tucker let out this little breath like an almost laugh, and Caboose gasped from the couch.

“Mean Church is back,” Caboose said.

“I never went anywhere,” Church said, although he was aware it was a lie. He was still trying to untangle hazy memories from when his brain got scrambled. Or… more scrambled.

“If you’re rude you’re not gonna get any cereal,” Tucker said, but he was already getting out a bowl. Church cast around for a spoon, and his eyes fell on the workbook beside Carolina, a page full of complex math problems. Well, they looked complex. But they were easy, Church had done way harder than—

“Urgh,” he said, gripping his forehead.

“Church?” Tucker asked, all the mirth drained out of his voice. Church was aware of how suddenly the room had gone silence.

“Nothing. I’m fine,” he said.

“You don’t sound fine,” Tucker said.

“My head hurts,” Church mumbled. It was already going away. He glanced down at the workbook again, but Carolina pointedly closed it and pulled it closer to her bowl of cereal. _Mine_ , she was saying. Church accepted cereal from Tucker and ate silently.

 

Tucker was making sandwiches for lunch when Caboose started climbing on the counter. He plucked him off and deposited him on the floor.

“No, Tucker, I have to get up there,” Caboose insisted.

“For what? We’re out of cookies, I already told you.”

“I have to look for Gamma,” Caboose said.

“Look for—what?”

“Gamma, I found everyone except him.”

“Are you guys playing hide and seek?”

“Yes. I’m doing very well. But I need to check the cupboards.”

“Okay well firstly, he wouldn’t fit up there. And second, I would have seen him come in. So go look somewhere else.” Casting a doubtful look at the cupboards, Caboose slunk off to the bathroom. Tucker resumed making sandwiches. Then he paused for a moment, and opened the cupboard nearest to him. No. You definitely couldn’t fit a kid in there. Not even Gamma. He did check the top of the fridge too though, to be safe.

By the time he was finished with the sandwiches though, Caboose had gotten himself pretty worked up, scooting from room to room, checking behind the couch (even though it was backed up against the wall) and under the coffee table. He’d enlisted Delta to help him too apparently, although he wasn’t so much helping as pointing out places that Gamma couldn’t be.

“You guys still looking for him?” Tucker asked.

“I am almost one hundred percent sure Gamma is not in this room,” Delta said.

“You checked the bathroom?” Tucker asked, walking over to glance inside. He definitely wasn’t in there. And he wasn’t in the main room, there was nowhere he would fit.

“Caboose checked, and I rechecked with him,” Delta said.

“He has to be in the bedroom,” Tucker said, walking over to hit the door button. He looked inside and saw Church, asleep fully clothed on top of his bed, and Carolina, sitting on her bunk writing in her workbook.

“Did you guys see Gamma? Is he in here?” Tucker asked. Carolina shook her head. Tucker checked under all the beds, with Caboose and Delta trailing after him. Church cracked his eyes open and glared at them. “Church, did you see Gamma?” he asked. Church shook his head, looking incredulous at the idea that he would be playing hide-and-seek. In his crib, Theta grabbed the bars with chubby fists and whimpered to be let out. Tucker walked over and plucked him out, balancing him on a hip.

“He’s not anywhere. Oh! He must have disappeared,” Caboose said, marveling. Tucker swallowed.

“Shit. Shit. Okay. Shit.” Where would he go? He sure as hell wasn’t in the apartment, it was all concrete so hiding places were slim. He had to have gone outside. Carolina slid down off her bunk and onto the floor.

“I’ll help you look, she said.”

“Someone has to watch Theta if I’m gonna go outside.” Carolina glanced back at Church and Delta, as if she was weighing them.

“We’ll bring him with us,” she said. Tucker glanced at Delta, Church and Caboose.

“Okay. Just. Okay, the three of you, don’t… just. Okay, stay in the bedroom. Delta, you’re in charge.”

“Hey, I’m older,” Church put in.

“All right, Church, you’re in charge. In the event that Church is unfit to lead, Delta, you take over. Don’t let Caboose… just don’t let Caboose…. You know what I mean.”

“I understand,” Delta said. Tucker lingered another second.

“Come on,” Carolina said, tugging at his shirt. “It’s gonna be dark out soon.”

“We’re fine,” Church said.

They headed outside, walked around the apartment, checking any kind of nook or cranny a kid could fit in.

“Where would he go? It’s not like he would… run away or something, would he?” Tucker asked. Carolina shrugged. “You’re helpful as always.”

“Hey, I’m out here, aren’t I?” Carolina said.

“Yeah, why are you out here? I didn’t think you liked Gamma.”

“He’s okay.”

“You don’t really hate any of them, do you? Not even Church.”

“I hate _you_.”

“Yeah, yeah.” They turned a corner and scanned the distant stretch of nothing. No where a kid could be. Where would he go, even if he was running away?

“Maybe we missed him somehow. Or we could check the laundry,” Carolina said. Tucker’s arms were killing him from carrying Theta.

“I can take him,” Carolina said, like she’d read his mind.

“You sure?” Tucker asked. Carolina nodded. He passed Theta down to her. He pulled at her hair and her cheeks with his chubby little fingers. She made this sound like an almost-laugh. They checked the laundry, but he wasn’t there.

“We should check on the others before we head out again,” Tucker said. They returned to the apartment. Tucker felt his heart go cold when they got close. The door was open. He looked inside. Nothing. The place was empty. Caboose, Delta and Church were gone. Carolina was silent beside him.

“Oh no,” Tucker whispered.

“Tucker?” someone called. He turned around to see Wash. There was a small child clinging to his shoulders. The small child was Caboose.

“Um, hey. So, your kids invaded my house,” he said meekly.

“Oh, thank fuck,” Tucker groaned. He felt like he could cry with relief. Wash invited them in.

“I found him hiding in one of my kitchen cupboards, eating a bag of cookies. So I came and knocked on your door, but it was just the kids there. Uh, and then Caboose insisted that if Gamma got to see my place then he should too, and Church and Delta were watching him so, they came over too. I’m really sorry.”

“I’m just glad they’re all here. And in tact.”

“Can we stay with Wash? He has cookies,” Caboose said, tugging on Tucker’s pant leg.

“Oh, now they like me,” Wash laughed. It was this easy, casual laugh, and for a second it was like Tucker could see Wash as the nervous guy joking around with Agent York. He was so much harder now. Rougher. Deep circles under his eyes that Tucker was sure wouldn’t have been there before. He imagined the kids weren’t the only ones who got nightmares. No, he knew they weren’t. Waking up drenched in sweat wasn’t new to him. A good nights sleep was something he’d written off a long time ago as a casualty of war.

“Yeah, as much as I’m sure you all wanna hang out here with Wash and eat all his junk food, you’re coming back home instead. And you’re all officially in trouble for leaving without telling me.”

“Hey, we were just looking out for Caboose,” Church squeaked.

“And Gamma is especially in trouble,” Tucker continued. He was drunk on power. Wash laughed again, and again, it sounded totally crazy. It was like getting Carolina to smile. Tucker dropped down into a chair beside Wash at the kitchen counter and dropped his head into his hands.

“I think I’m a bad parent,” he said quietly. Gamma and Caboose were running sugar-high circles around one another.

“This probably happens to everyone,” Wash said, with little confidence. “Well, not everyone has six kids to take care of. Six… interesting kids.”

“You can say weird,” Carolina said, pushing Theta into Wash’s arms and climbing onto a chair next to him.

“You could be doing worse, is what I’m saying,” Wash continued.

“It’s true,” Carolina said. Tucker sat up and looked at her in surprise. She gave him a kind of enduring scowl. An affectionate scowl, it could maybe be called. “You’re not… terrible,” she said quietly. Tucker grinned.

“All right. Come on, we’re all gonna get out of Wash’s house and stop bothering him,” he said. Wash handed Theta back to Tucker, but there was this moment of slight hesitation, like he wanted to keep holding him, just for a moment or two.

“And uh, I owe you one, as always, so feel free to… come over and steal my coffee or whatever. You know,” Tucker said. _Smooth. Real smooth Tucker_ , he thought. Wash nodded.

“I think he likes you,” Carolina said, when Tucker was unlocking the door to their apartment.

“What? Shut up,” he said. Carolina just laughed.


	9. Chapter 9

****

Tucker was unpacking groceries from the supply shipment with “help” from Caboose (he was running around throwing pieces of packaging at the walls) when he came across something that wasn’t food or toilet paper or diapers. It was a bottle of hair dye. Fire engine red.

“Carolina,” he called, and she came slinking into the room like a cat that knows its been caught clawing the nice couch.

“How did this get in with the groceries?” he asked.

“I got Delta to change the order.”

“But we don’t even issue the order; someone at the UNSC makes it.”

“I know.”

“So you now employ your siblings to break the law. Is this the kind of house we’re living in now? What did you pay him?”

“He said that crayons were no good for sketching, and he wanted one of my good pencils.” Tucker raised an eyebrow. So she really wanted the hair dye. The box of pencils had been salvaged from the crash; they were an item Carolina kept under her pillow. She used each one until it was a stub and then started a new one. They weren’t special pencils—except the Director had given them to her. So if she was willing to trade away one of those for some hacking, she must have really wanted to get rid of the blonde roots encroaching on her red hair.

“Do you know how to use this?” he asked.

“Sort of. One of the agents helped me last time.”

“One of the state agents? Like Wash?” he asked.

“They’re not all boys. South helped me do it. She and CT were watching me sometimes before Caboose and Gamma and Theta showed up and they started hiring babysitters.”

“Do you… do you want me to do it?” Tucker asked, looking at the bottle dubiously. Carolina looked at him equally dubiously. Her eyes flicked around the room, as if assessing and slowly concluding that there were no other options.

“Yeah, okay,” she said.

 

It was a disaster, but not an unmitigated one. Tucker spent more time trying to scrub blood red dye off the wall than he did actually putting dye on Carolina’s head. And the thing was, he couldn’t even blame Caboose coming in an tipping the dye bowl over for all of it, because he’d already gotten it on Carolina’s ear, his arm, and the wall before Caboose came in.

When Carolina emerged from the bathroom with wet red hair and a stained towel though, she had her shoulders lifted up a little more, and she was smiling, like things had been set right in the world. Then she started rubbing Gamma’s face with her hair-dye-towel and Tucker had to come and intervene before blood was spilled.

Later, he talked Caboose into helping him clean by saying it was a game to see who could scrub more dye off the tiles but he felt bad about it afterwards, even if Caboose seemed to have a good time. Kid could amuse himself with anything.

Mid-afternoon, when the kids were napping, with the exception of Carolina and Church, who were of course too old to nap. Church had been sitting on the couch doing nothing and watching Carolina read a book on her datapad until he eventually slumped over and fell asleep. Wash came to their door with a box.

“Hey, so, I was in the cargo port picking up some stuff for work and I… kind of thought…” he trailed off, blush peppering the spaces between his freckles. He set down the box and then opened it and lifted out a set of colorful wooden blocks sealed in plastic.

“I realize some of them are probably a little old for these but I thought Theta and Caboose don’t seem to have any toys, so I…”

“Holy shit dude,” Tucker said, kind of forgetting himself. “You’re amazing.” Wash’s eyebrows went up. “I mean, this is amazing,” he said, with an awkward cough. “This is great. They’re gonna love these,” he said, taking the blocks from Wash.

“I actually got something else,” Wash said, and reached down into the box again. He pulled out a bottle of—

“Holy shit, is that booze?” Tucker asked.

“Yeah, I was wondering if you’d want to come over sometime. And uh. Drink. With me,” Wash said. Tucker wanted to go drink with him right then. He was sort of going crazy stuck in the apartment with six kids all the time. He glanced back towards the bedroom.

“I would, it’s just… there’s no one to watch the kids, I don’t really know any of our neighbors…” he trailed off.

“I’ll babysit,” Carolina said, getting up off the couch and walking over to the door.

“Yeah right,” Tucker started to say.

“I watch Theta and Caboose all the time. And Delta will help,” she said.

“What about the time Delta was supposed to be looking after Church and Caboose?” Tucker said, glancing over at Church to make sure he was actually asleep. Carolina waved her hand.

“I wasn’t there. You’ll just be next door. You can go on your date and we’ll be fine,” she said. Tucker would have thought she was up to something, but he didn’t think she would lie right to his face. It was possible, he concluded, that she was paying him back for dying her hair.

“Okay,” Tucker said, and looked back to Wash, who grinned.

“Come by at eight then,” he said, picking up the empty box and leaving. Tucker shut the door behind him and then turned around and leaned on it. Caboose emerged from the bedroom rubbing his eyes and spotted the blocks.

“What are those?” he cried, running over to investigate.”

“Hang on I’ll get the plastic off,” Tucker said, rummaging through the drawers for a knife. He froze. “Did you say date?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Carolina said.

“And he said come by at eight,” Tucker said, stunned.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, my, god.”

 

Tucker did briefly wonder if he should wear something like… not his jeans and t-shirt. But like he had the day he showed up to meet the Director about the babysitting job, he just shrugged it off. He shaved though, and he did put on his nicer jeans. The ones that made his ass look good.

Before he left he crouched down in front of Carolina and put his hands on her shoulders.

“What do you do if Caboose gets any of his body parts stuck in the sink, drawers or appliances?” he asked.

“Go get you.”

“And if there’s a fire?”

“Get everyone out and go get you.”

“And if Theta won’t stop crying?”

“Go get you. Tucker, I’m twelve, I’m not an idiot,” she said.

“I’m here too,” Church said.

“Just, seriously, come tell me if anything goes wrong,” Tucker said.

“We’ll be fine. Go have fun,” Carolina said, shrugging his hands away. He felt bad leaving, and he continued to feel bad until he was inside Wash’s apartment with a drink in his hand, at which time he felt a lot less bad.

“So, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Tucker said, taking a sip from his mug (Wash only owned two glasses, and one of them was dirty). They were drinking essentially moonshine, but it was made by people with license so it was less likely to make you blind. It tasted like drinking perfume and floor cleaner.

“Go ahead,” Wash said. His cheeks were a little flushed, maybe from nerves. Maybe he was a little drunk already.

“Did it hurt?” Tucker asked, watching his brow furrow.

“Did what—oh no, Tucker, don’t.”

“When you fell from heaven?”

“Tucker, that’s awful.”

“Are your pants made of mirrors?”

“Tucker.”

“Because I can see myself in them, bow chicka wow wow.”

“Is this gonna go on all night?” Wash asked in mock anger, although he was clearly trying not to laugh.

“I’ve been drowning in diapers for weeks, unable to make sex jokes.”

“That must have been sooo hard for you.”

“It was rough, Washington. It was really rough.” They paused then, a silence falling suddenly. Tucker looked over Wash’s face, a sea of freckles interrupted by the odd scar. Wash was looking into his eyes.

“Maybe I can see you in my pants too,” Wash said. Tucker laughed. Then he drained his mug and put it down on the counter. Tucker lifted the glass out of his hands and set it down carefully. He locked eyes with Wash, trying to ask him without asking. Is this okay? Can I keep going? In response, Wash put a hand out and pressed it against Tucker’s chest, then closed it into a fist, scrunching up his shirt and pulling him down closer. They kissed. It was timid. Tucker sat down on the couch and put his hands on Wash’s face, pulling him in close and taking in that soap-clean, aftershave scent of him, breathing in deep before they were kissing again, wrapped up in each other’s arms, Tucker straddling Wash’s lap.

“My bed is like, two feet away from us,” Wash mentioned, in what was probably an attempt at being nonchalant. Well, Tucker hadn’t been the most charming date ever so he guessed it made them even.

“Let’s move this two feet away then,” Tucker said. They tumbled into bed, tugging off clothes, Wash’s shirt gone and Tucker’s jeans unbuckled. They stopped part-way through undressing so they could start kissing again, Tucker tracing the sharp line of Wash’s jaw with his lips. Wash let out a gasp and gripped Tucker’s shirt. When they broke apart he pulled it off and tossed it aside, rolled them over so Tucker was on his back looking up at Wash who was… not looking at his face. He’d forgotten. How much time had he spent looking at that scar in the shower and just minutes kissing Wash had made him forget that he didn’t go shirtless for anything.

Wash was looking, a kind of unconcealed horror on his face as his eyes traced over the scar. Tucker could see him forming questions that he suddenly felt too naked to answer. He reached for the sheets.

“I’m sorry,” Wash said, quietly.

“For what?”

“For looking,” he said, casting his eyes away towards the wall. Tucker felt his face crumple.

“Is it that bad?” he asked, voice wavering on the last word. Now I sound like a girl, he thought resentfully. Wash looked back at him, face all innocent surprise.

“No! No, it’s not I just… you seemed like maybe you didn’t want me to see it.”

“It’s okay. It’s fine,” Tucker said.

“Do you want to keep going?” Wash asked.

“Can we just sleep together? I mean, actually sleep?” Tucker asked.

“Sure,” Wash said. He dropped down onto his side next to Tucker, their legs now intertwined. He didn’t ask where the scar was from. He seemed to sense that Tucker wasn’t ready, or maybe able, to talk about it. It was weird, he’d told Carolina, sort of. But the thing was, telling Carolina was easy. With kids you could say things like: because, or I don’t want to talk about it. With adults, they knew the right questions to ask. The ones that Tucker did not want to answer.

They fell asleep like that. Tucker woke up in the dark and rolled over to see Wash’s clock reading three am. He slid out of bed and put his clothes on, and went back next door to check on the kids.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're coming up on the end of this fic, and I wanna know, before we get to the ending, is there anything you guys wanna see? More Delta? More Gamma? More Doc? More kids doing crafts? Let me know.


	10. Chapter 10

When Tucker answered the door he still had the memo in his hand, the paper wrinkling from sweat and the way he was clutching it, smearing the official UNSC logo. He stared through Wash for a lengthy moment. Wash’s grin turned awkward, and then faded.

“Tucker? Is… is something wrong?” Unable to speak, Tucker thrust the paper into his chest. Wash took it and scanned it. Then he looked up in horror. “Oh no,” he whispered.

“Yeah. Oh fuckin’ no,” Tucker said. Wash was holding a memo from the UNSC. You would think that kids who were… vat grown or whatever on a ship would be fully immunized against everything but nope. So the UNSC could, at the snap of their fingers, just issue him a tidy memo, telling him he needed to take six kids to get more shots. Six.

“Six Wash. Six, I have to take six kids to get shots. And they’re all criers. Except Carolina, who is a puncher. She’ll punch me Wash. I know it.”

“Okay calm down. She won’t punch you.”

“What are you ladies gossiping about?” Carolina called, exiting the bedroom holding Gamma’s game above her head with an irate Gamma chasing after her.

“Carolina, give that back,” Tucker groaned. Caboose came dashing out of the bedroom after them, and then skidded to a halt.

“Hey, Wash is here! Did you come to play?” he asked. “Or do you have to go fight crime?” Wash raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t think he understands what you do,” Tucker said.

“I came because we’re gonna go on a fun adventure,” Wash said, looking at Tucker nervously. Now Tucker was the one raising his eyebrows.

“You know you’re volunteering for hell, right?” he asked. Wash just shrugged, his eyes flicking over to Church, who was absently playing with the colored wood blocks. Theta was sitting up on a blanket Tucker had spread out chewing on one of the blocks.

“If you want me there. I mean, I figure you need the extra hands, and it’s my day off.” Tucker was kind of stunned. This was a guy who was willing to spend his day off helping herd kids all the way to screamingland, for a guy who didn’t even put out. He was like… he was kind of perfect. Well, no, he was gawky and snippy and a dork but… he was also perfect. Sort of.

“Yeah. Hell yeah. I need all the help I can get,” Tucker said.

“Okay. Count me in then.” It went about as well as could be expected. Just getting their shoes on was an ordeal that resulted in:

Tears: 2 counts (Caboose and Theta)

Destruction of furniture: 1 count (good-bye coffee table)

Wash getting gum in his hair: 1 count (somehow)

Where Caboose even got gum was a worrying mystery that Tucker was forced to put aside for the time. They herded the kids onto the transport. Tucker sat with Theta on his lap and Wash stood with Caboose clinging to his leg and Delta holding onto Caboose by the back of his shirt. Tucker had implemented the buddy system again. Gamma and Carolina had immediately paired up, and Delta and Caboose. Church was therefore stuck with Theta, and he sulked the whole ride.

Caboose seemed to kind of idolize Church, but he and Delta got along more easily. Church was prone to just telling Caboose to shut up and leave him along (a lot like Carolina) where instead Delta would listen to him patiently, no matter what he was saying.

“My arms are killing me,” Tucker said, as they were walking through the medical building parking lot.

“You should get a stroller. Or one of those baby holder things.”

“Yeah, probably,” Tucker said, and it kind of hit him there that… he wasn’t really a babysitter anymore. He’d been lying awake at night wondering how to get the kids enrolled in school and what they were gonna do when they were older and without meaning to, without noticing properly, he’d stopped being their caretaker and started being their dad. And that was fucking terrifying. Right down to the core.

“You okay?” Wash asked, as they were entering the building.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Tucker said. Delta, who was generally quicker on the uptake, read the sign of the building and turned to bolt. Gamma, seeing Delta move, also went to take off, but Carolina grabbed the back of his shirt.

“You would betray me?” Gamma gasped.

“It’s for your own good,” Carolina said sternly. Wash, meanwhile, had swept Delta up into his arms.

“I am aware that I need vaccinations, but I would rather we reschedule,” Delta said quickly.

“Sorry D. It’s today,” Tucker said.

“What’s a vac-sum-nation?” Caboose asked. Everyone looked at each other.

“Um. It’s a thing that keeps you healthy,” Wash said.

“I like to be healthy,” Caboose said.

He went first, and he cried. The huge bawling kind of crying that got right at Tucker’s heartstrings. Then Delta was next, and he managed to keep that super serious blank face but he got tears welling up in his eyes. Tucker handed Theta over to Wash so that he could scoop Delta off the table once Doc had stuck a little band-aid over his arm, and Delta wrapped his arms around Tucker’s neck and hugged him tightly enough that Tucker thought maybe although he didn’t show it as much as Theta or Caboose, Delta needed people, needed someone to reassure him, just as much as the others.

Gamma didn’t cry, and neither did Church. The two of them sat straight faced and totally unafraid. It was like they’d learned to shut down the scared kid part of themselves.

A nurse came in while Carolina was on the table and asked Tucker to come fill out some forms at the front desk.

“You got this under control?” he asked Wash, who gave him a nod.

He was finishing with the last one when Doc came out into the room, holding Theta, who was red-cheeked and teary eyed, but no longer crying. He was clinging to Doc’s lab coat.

“Hey buddy, you okay?” Tucker asked, gently squeezing one of his chubby cheeks. Theta giggled. “The other kids are good right?” Tucker asked.

“Yup, they’re with Washington and the nurse right now,” Doc said.

“I’m almost done with the forms,” Tucker said, turning back to them. Doc stayed standing there, silent. Tucker paused. “Do you need me to take Theta?” he asked.

“No, I’m fine with him,” Doc said.

“So… do you need something?” Tucker asked.

“Do you remember me?” Doc asked. He said it slow, with this big pause before he started like he was debating if he wanted to mention it at all.

“What do you mean remember you? Like from when I brought Church in?”

“I guess not then,” Doc said. Tucker bit the inside of his cheek, twiddling the pen in his hand.

“Where would I remember you from?” Tucker asked. He could feel his stomach getting heavy, his heart clenching up.

“I used to be a field medic. I wondered if you might remember. We met… it was a while ago. You were pretty out of it.” Biofoam. Hands on his face, on his skin, touching him where he was raw, where he’d cut himself open, and that emptiness in his arms, burning emptiness where something had been taken away from him. Tucker could feel his face go hard. For a moment, he couldn’t take a breath. It felt like he was drowning, and he started to panic.

“Tucker? Tucker!” Doc was saying. Theta started to wail. Tucker sucked in a breath. Theta needs me, he thought. It wasn’t a full, made-of-words thought, just an idea, bright and immediate in his head. He took another breath. Felt some of that clench up, lock-your-jaw instinct recede. He shook his head, trying to push out the memories.

“Are you okay?” Doc asked, although they both knew the answer pretty well.

“I’m fine,” Tucker said.

“I was going to say if you ever wanted to talk…” Doc trailed off.

“Nope. I’m fine,” Tucker said. He scrawled his signature on the last form, and then held his hands out. “I’ll take him back now,” he said. Doc put Theta into his arms. He felt that ice-lump that was weighing down his stomach melt away a little.

On the ride home, it started to rain, just a few drops catching the windows of the transport, but they had to bolt for home as it quickly transformed into a downpour.

They arrived in the apartment soaking wet and laughing and the kids had kind of forgotten the betrayal and they spent the next twenty minutes or so dumping wet clothes and finding dry ones (half pajamas) and toweling off everyone’s hair (especially Carolina’s, because it dripped red staining water everywhere).

Tucker made hot chocolate and they sat with the couch folded out into a bed in a kind of heap. Caboose fell asleep with his head on Wash’s leg.

“Hey, uh, thanks for letting me come,” Wash whispered. Carolina picked herself up and retreated of into the bedroom. Church followed after her. Gamma was playing his game on the lowest volume beside a sleeping Delta, but his eyes were drooping like he was about to fall asleep.

“Thanks? I should be thanking you,” Tucker said.

“Yeah but… without you guys it would just be me, out here, doing whatever the UNSC tells me… totally… totally alone. My teammates, I thought we were friends, but they took off and left me to die. So thanks for letting me come be a disaster at helping out.”

“You’re not a total disaster,” Tucker said. “And I’d go crazy if it was just me and the kids all the time.”

“I can hear you,” Gamma said sleepily.

“Yeah, and I love you, but you’re a pain in the ass,” Tucker replied.

“Hnn,” Gamma said, which was as close to an “I love you too” as Tucker figured he’d ever be getting. But it was close enough.


	11. Chapter 11

It was just supposed to be a fucking job. But then, like everything else in Tucker’s miserable life, it snowballed. It snowballed into a fucking avalanche until he was knocking on Wash’s door at four in the morning desperate and exhausted and ready to beg for help. Because he was not cut out for this shit.

It started a day earlier, when the groceries arrived. Tucker was taking the boxes from the delivery guy, Caboose was doing somersaults on the couch and Church was smacking his legs away whenever he came close to kicking him in the face.

Carolina slid off her stool at the counter to help unpack the grocery boxes.

“Hey, I saw you guys on the news,” the delivery guy said.

“Right, the whole clone thing,” Tucker said, wishing he would stop talking.

“No, the trial coverage for Dr. Church. Your picture with the kids was on,” the guy said. Tucker took the last box from him and shut the door in his face. When he turned around Carolina and Church were both staring at him.

“There was a trial?” Church asked.

“Is he in jail?” Carolina asked. Tucker said nothing. He put the box on the counter. Caboose rolled right into Church and bounced off him. Church didn’t seem to notice. “Why didn’t we know about the trial?” Carolina asked.

“The UNSC said none of you would have to testify. That you didn’t need to know.”

“And now you tell the UNSC everything, but not us. Because we’re just kids, right?” Carolina spat. Church’s expression was totally unreadable.

“I was just trying to look out for you,” Tucker said.

“Yeah well listen Tucker, you can barely take care of yourself, so I actually don’t need you to censor my life! You’re not my dad! And you never will be! And you’re not Theta’s dad, or Delta, or Gamma’s or any of ours! You’re just the nearest loser the UNSC could pay to take a bunch of problems off their hands!”

The room had gone very quiet. Caboose looked from Tucker to Carolina.

“Go to your room,” Tucker said. Carolina stared up at him furiously, her hands balled into fists.

“Just go to your fuckin room, okay?” Tucker yelled.

“Come on, Church,” she said, marching over to the couch. She grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him off into the bedroom. Caboose stayed sitting on the couch. His lower lip was wobbling.

“Caboose, I’m sorry. I yelled, I’m sorry,” Tucker said. Caboose nodded. He slid off the couch and for a horrible painful second Tucker thought that he would walk into the bedroom too, that Carolina was right, and he was kidding himself thinking he could ever be anything close to a dad. But then he walked over to Tucker and buried his face in his pant leg, wrapping his arms around him. Tucker reached down and scooped him up into his arms. Caboose buried his face in his shoulder.

“My dad is going to come pick me up later. He is definitely coming. But you could be my dad for now maybe,” he said. Tucker felt his face get hot like tears were welling up, but he swallowed them back quickly.

“Thanks Caboose.”

“No problem, Tuckerdad.”

 

And for just then, at least, it seemed like that was that. When Tucker called everyone to dinner, Carolina and Church came slinking in after Gamma and Delta, and refused to talk to anyone.

Tucker woke up in the middle of the night, and he could just tell it was the deep, horrible middle of the night, without needing to squint through the dark at the clock on the microwave. Caboose was on the bed, tugging on his cheek.

“Tucker. Tuckerdad,” he was saying.

“Mmmmmmmoh god, what Caboose?” he groaned.

“It’s cold in the bedroom. And Theta’s awake.” Something about that sentence, that could have just been normal complaints, sent ice into Tucker’s stomach. He sat up, followed Caboose into the bedroom. Sure enough, there was Theta, sitting up in his crib and blinking at them with his big teary eyes. Gamma and Delta were asleep in their beds and the window (that had been locked, to be clear) was wide open. Church and Carolina were gone.

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh my god,” Tucker said.

 

Outside in the dark it was cold. The wind rushed in Church ears as he chased after Carolina, afraid now that she had let go of his hand he would lose her. He felt unseated at the openness of the world around him, like he had broken a rule and the clock was now ticking against him until punishment arrived. He hadn’t been out, free, totally untethered before. No. He could be tethered. To Carolina. But she was really really fast.

“Slow down,” he gasped.

“No, we have to get to the transport. If Tucker wakes up he’s gonna come looking for us.” Church felt a stab of fear at the idea of Tucker looking for them. He’d be mad.

“Carolina, you’re too fast!” Church cried.

“Deal with it,” she called back. But she slowed down a little. And he figured, maybe she didn’t want to do this alone. She told Church when they were whispering in the dark hatching their plan, that she wanted him to come along because he was the only one old enough to be helpful, and because he had his own score to settle. But now he wondered if she wanted someone with her because she was scared.

Carolina talked their way onto the transport with a sob story about how they got separated from their mom and had been wandering around looking for her for hours. The transport operator, a middle aged woman in half-armor, was very responsive to their story. Or maybe it was Church’s teary eyes that did it (Carolina had punched him in the gut before they rounded the corner).

On the transport the lights were so bright that the windows turned reflective and Church couldn’t see out. So he slid down in his seat and let his eyes glaze over. Carolina picked at her nails, and when she was done with that, she picked with the hem of her sweater sleeve.

“You don’t look like him that much,” she said suddenly. Church blinked, and looked over at her. “Like, you do. I’ve seen pictures. You got his hair and skin and stuff. But you look like… not like him in the eyes.”

“Not like him?”

“You look like my mom. In the eyes. Sort of. I can’t explain it.”

“We don’t have to turn into him,” Church said, quietly. He was saying it less for Carolina, more for himself.

“I know that,” she said.

 

“Wash! Wash!” Tucker pounded his fist into the door so hard that he figured either the door was gonna break or his hand was, but they couldn’t go on like this. Then the door opened, and he almost punched Wash in the face. Wash caught his fist.

“Whoa,” he said.

“Carolina and Church are gone,” Tucker gasped, and saying it out loud was the worst, the sickliest, the most awful thing he’d had to do for as long as he could remember.

“Oh my god,” Wash said.

“I think I might know where they’re going. I need you to watch the kids, please,” Wash held up his hands to stop him talking.

“You got it. I’ll just grab my shoes. Go,” he said. Tucker nodded, breathless.

“Okay. Fuck.” Wash put his hand out, grabbed Tucker by the face so his fingers were on the back of his neck. Gentle but sturdy, steadying him.

“Hey. You’ll find them. It’s going to be okay,” he said. Tucker nodded.

 

The bewildered guy at the tram station told him that he had seen two kids, who had told him some story about getting separated from their mom.

“Those are my kids,” Tucker said, breathlessly. The guy raised an eyebrow at him.

“My adopted kids,” Tucker added.

“Well, you’re just in time, buddy, this is the last transport running today,” he said. Tucker got on board.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the week break, but endings are hard. I'm gonna be posting it in either three or two parts, so consider this part one.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last one, guys! I want to thank everyone for their awesome comments and words of encouragement. See ya next time!

In the cell, everything was silent, at least, to the outside observer. To the Director, the walls echoed with sound. A single voice, over and over, leaving him. The last time he saw her. They never said goodbye. Because she wanted it that way. But it irked him.

Footsteps in the hall. The cell door opened.

“You have visitors,” a guard informed him. The director looked up, surprised.

“I thought that lawyers were supposed to leave me alone now,” he drawled.

“They aren’t lawyers,” the guard said. “It’s your kids.” The words: “I don’t have kids,” were almost on his tongue, but he stopped himself. He had one. Carolina. But she was with the UNSC now, someone was taking care of her. Curious, he got up and followed the guard. They shackled him at the doorway. Comedic. He was never a violent criminal, but they had to go through the motions. They’d found the records, of course. Of Alpha. So he was going away for good. Though he’d never directly committed an act of violence. Murder is murder, he remembered someone saying at the trial, no matter how indirect.

“No,” he had said, standing up. “This is not murder. This is science _._ This is _innovation._ ” Apparently, the difference was trifling. But he knew honestly, he was lying to himself. In his mission to end the war, it had been so easy to copy himself, that this idea had sparked. He could create her again. It would be so easy. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t easy at all. And the copies weren’t right, weren’t even close. They were missing some crucial part, some feature of the human soul he could never replicate.

The guard urged him to pick up the pace. They rounded a corner, and he was taken through a door, where he sat down in a chair in front of a glass window and came face to face with himself. Young, furious, sitting next to his daughter with hands balled into small fists. He looked stronger than he had, last time Leonard had seen him. Last time, he looked like the Alpha before he died. Like he was all used up.

“Carolina. Epsilon,” he greeted through the speaker. The small him gave him the finger.

“My name is Church, asshole,” he said.

“Of course. My mistake,” Leonard said. Carolina was looking at her lap. She said nothing.

“Tex told me all about you,” Church said. Leonard nodded. “That you were supposed to be helping people.” Leonard nodded. “But you lied to everyone.”

“Yes.”

“And you killed my oldest brother.”

“Yes.”

“And you were just trying to bring back your dead wife.” Silence reigned. Leonard said nothing. It was true, in a way. How bizarre, to be confronted by this small echo of yourself. But he was right, wasn’t he? No matter what banner he had worked under, it was all selfishness. Just a mask, for an old man trying to get back what he had lost. And what had he ended up with? A big handful of nothing.

“Well, I hope you rot in there,” Church cried, banging a fist on the glass. Carolina put a hand out, touched his arm. Gently. She stood up, lifted her head so they were looking face to face. And Leonard realized that really, Church looked nothing like him. It was Carolina whose eyes were like staring at a mirror. Her brow furrowed.

“It’s okay,” she said quietly.

“Carolina…” Leonard started to say. But he didn’t know where he was going. What did he want to tell her? _I wish you had had more time. I wish you had known her better. Then you would understand,_ he thought.

“I should have been better,” she said. “I should have been stronger. I—”

“No. I should have been better. I should have seen you for what you are,” Leonard said. “You were my greatest creation,” he said quietly. Our greatest creation.

“Children aren’t creations, dad. They’re people,” Carolina said. She took Church’s hand, and started towards the door. When he lingered a moment, staring back at Leonard, she tugged at his arm. He followed her out. Leonard watched the door close behind them.

 

Tucker got there late. By the time he had talked his way in at the prison, he ran into Church and Carolina in the hall. They were holding hands. They looked… defiant. Tucker saw Carolina’s face twist and Church’s eyes widened and he wondered if they thought that he was going to yell at them and yeah, he was mad, he was fucking furious but he was so goddamned relieved. They were right there, whole, and solid and alive. He dropped down and threw his arms out and Carolina and Church broke apart, dashed forward into his arms. Tucker pulled them so close, and it was like he could finally breathe again.

“Do not fucking do this to me again,” Tucker said under his breath, and felt Carolina give the tiniest nod, and Church squeeze a handful of his shirt. “You ready to come home?” he asked, standing up. Carolina slipped her hand into his, and Church, begrudgingly, did the same.

The transport was closed but Tucker called Wash from the prison phone (which they nicely let him use) and Wash called in a favor with one of the guards he worked with, who offered to drive them home. She was kind of crass, but nice.

“So these are your kids?” she asked, twisting around to look in the back and then looking back at Tucker.

“Yeah.” She raised an eyebrow.

“They’re adopted. People adopt kids.”

“I’m just kidding. Wash told me about it. I knew him on the Mother of Invention, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“I was a pilot. Met Delta once actually. He’s a weird little guy, but he’s smart.” Tucker glanced at the back seat. Church was asleep, or close to it. Carolina was staring out the window. The sun was just starting to rise, and it was raining, soft taps on the car windows. Tucker thanked her for the ride, realizing only after she had sped away that he’d never asked her name. He’d also neglected to use any pick up lines, which was embarrassing.

“Are you mad at us?” Carolina asked, as they were walking up the steps.

“Hell yeah I’m mad!” Tucker said. “But listen. You guys are still good kids. And I love you. No matter what.”

“Okay,” Carolina said. Inside, Wash was asleep on the couch, with Theta nearby in the baby carrier. Caboose was asleep on the floor, a thick strand of drool connecting him to a scatter of drawing papers. When the door closed behind them, Caboose snapped up, blinking and rubbing his eyes.

“Carolina! Church!” he cried. Wash started awake on the couch with a confused snort. Caboose went slipping and dashing across the floor to wrap his arms around Church who made only a vague effort to fight him off.

“Okay. I’m gonna make pancakes,” Tucker said. Wash got up off the couch and picked up Theta out of the baby carrier, coming over to stand at the counter with Tucker while he got out the frying pan and the baking mix.

“I knew you’d find them,” he said. He was exhausted and furious and yet, Tucker was fighting off a grin.

“Hey, you wanna stay for breakfast?” he asked. Wash bounced Theta in his arms.

“Sure. Why not?” he said. Tucker darted forward to kiss Theta on the head. Then he kissed Wash.

“Eeewwwww,” Caboose called.

“Okay, okay, we’re stopping,” Wash assured him. Tucker poured baking mix into a bowl, and laughed.

 

Some time later

 

Tucker was trying to make sense of the enrolment forms for the local school that the UNSC had sent him when he noticed Caboose was tugging on his leg.

“What, Caboose?” he asked.

“Can I go next door to play?”

“What? No. Wash isn’t home, remember?”

“No, the other next door. Where the kids are,” Caboose said.

“What?”

So that was how Tucker ended up putting shoes on all the kids and dragging them next door. And sure enough, there were kids playing on the porch. This chubby little kid in a stained orange shirt had just smacked a cookie out of another kid’s hand, while a blonde toddler in a pink tutu twirled around them.

There was a guy in a lawnchair watching them. He had a huge scar on his face, and when he saw Tucker and the kids approaching he barked:

“All right boys, front and centre on the double.” The kid in the tutu and cookie-less boy scrambled up and stood at attention. The orange one hauled himself to his feet and sauntered over to stand beside them, still eating the cookie.

“On the double? Why isn’t it ever on the single?” he asked, spraying crumbs.

“Shut up Grif,” the one in the maroon shirt said.

“Um, hey there. My kid wants to know if he can play with you guys,” Tucker said. Orange and Maroon one exchanged a look.

“Maybe if he promises to stop breaking stuff,” the orange one said.

“He smashed our jeep,” the one in the tutu said, brandishing the broken toy.

“Um, sorry about that,” Tucker said. “Caboose?” he added.

“I’m sorry about breaking your warthog,” Caboose said.

“It’s a puma!” the orange one insisted.

“Ehh, he can play. Don’t you a’worry, I can watch em,” the guy in the lawn chair said. “Name’s Sarge, by the way.

“Right. I’m Tucker. These your kids?”

“Naw, just some kids I picked up. I’m taking care of them for the state. Seems like these days there’s more orphans than there are soldiers.”

“Yeah. Kind of,” Tucker said.

“What about you?” Sarge asked. Caboose had already engaged the others in some sort of game of tag with complex added rules, and Delta and Gamma (and Church, shockingly) had joined in. Carolina was hanging back holding Theta’s hand like she was too cool for all this, but he got the feeling she’d be playing with them too soon enough.

“Uh, so, they’re all genetically modified clones kind of?” Tucker said.

“Hmm. That explains a lot about Caboose,” Sarge said.

“Actually not him. He and Carolina are just regular humans.”

“You sure about that?” Sarge asked.

“Relatively sure,” Tucker said.

“Well, how about I go get another chair?” he asked, standing up. “You want a beer, son?” he added.

“Oh man. I would fuckin’ love that,” Tucker said. The kids, having noticed that their shirts carried a certain theme, had declared red vs blue multi tag fight, and started calling Carolina in as reinforcements. She scowled at them. “You know, you don’t have to grow up all at once,” Tucker said. “And even if you do, you can still play tag.” Carolina lingered another minute or two. Then she picked up Theta and thrust him into Tucker’s arms, and dashed off to save Caboose from being tagged out.

Sarge came back and set down the chair, handed Tucker a can of beer. They sat drinking for a while, watching the kids running around, screaming and shouting.

“Hey, would you ever be willing to babysit for a few hours?” Tucker asked.

“If you’d be willing to return the favor,” Sarge said. “Need some time away from all the yelling?”

“No, there’s someone I want to ask some questions.”

“Oh yeah?”

“A doctor, he works nearby. I think maybe he has some clues about… someone I’m looking for.”

“Well like I said, I’ll help you if you’re willing to take some of them off my hands for a while.” Tucker leaned back in his chair a little, let Theta squirm out of his lap to toddle around next to him, and watched Caboose somehow manage to tag Church out.

“He’s on my team!” Church yelled, his voice squeaking. Tucker suppressed a laugh. Maybe he was cut out for this shit. In a way.

“Hey, Sarge.”

“Yeah?”

“You ever wonder why we’re here?”

“Like in an, existential type of manner?”


End file.
